The Pelican's Bequest
by amzieglerin
Summary: A Dark Alchemical Odyssey or The Many Ways in Which One Severus Is Lost and Found from Boyhood Henceforth, Often with a Certain Harry
1. Chapter 1

The Pelican's Bequest

A Dark Alchemical Odyssey for Adults

~or~

The Many Ways in Which One Severus Is Lost and Found from Boyhood Henceforth, Often with a Certain Harry

~SS/HP~

(All original characters fall under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license)

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 1: The Paracelsan Method

_One would hardly believe that nature contained such virtues... For only a great artist is able to discover them, not one who is only versed in books, but one who has acquired his ability and skill through the experience of his hands... It is an important art, and therefore it cannot be clearly described, but can only be learned by experience._

_Paracelsus, translated by Jolande Jacobi_

It's so cold.

"Mum? The fire's gone out, Mum."

It's one of my earliest memories, from when I could have been no more than three, if that, because she was still cooking dinner at that time—a task my father took over until I started doing it.

We used to heat only one room at a time—I found out later that my father had forbidden her to use any kind of heating, muggle or wizard, unless she was in the room supervising. Apparently she was having a hard time modulating her power even then, and was liable to overburden sockets or cause a runaway wizard fire. So in the evening we would sit in the cozy kitchen near the fire and she would make casseroles I vaguely recall as lovely.

A taste of fennel and rosemary, a citrusy tang of lily root—these are the only memories that assure me my mother was once sane.

This day I tug on my mother's skirt, which usually brings her back from wherever she goes when she is absent. But this time she just keeps stirring the cauldron with complete absorption.

"Mum."

I am too young to articulate what I want to say—that the soup is not cooking, that she is scaring me with that empty look, that it's dark in the kitchen, so I settle for, "I'm cold."

Peeping out of her robe pocket, at eye level to me, I can see the magic stick. The one she uses to light the fire and draw pictures on the ceiling and do all manner of wonderful things. She has never let me touch it before; both she and my father keep it away from me. I feel a vague unease as I pull it from her pocket.

I can do this. I've seen her do it before. Mumbling something like what I've heard her say I point the stick at the cauldron. A few sparks fly out, nothing more, but I am ecstatic. I point a few more times but very little happens. My tiny attention begins to get frustrated. I'm cold and hungry.

"Mum," I say more insistently, but she is just stirring and stirring. Angrily, I jump up and down and point the stick while a sound rises from the pit of my stomach.

The fire lights.

Mother is woken up from her reverie. "See, Mum, I lighted it!"

"It's a beautiful fire, Severus," she says, and I'm not sure she knows I made it, but we stand there together with her hand playing with my hair, and my hand winding her robe, and it's all right.

When my father comes home, however, I want to tell someone again, so I say as she ladles out the soup, "I helped!"

"What did you do?" His eyes narrow and I think I'm in trouble.

"Severus helped stir the soup," my mother says, beaming at my father in that way that never fails to make his face relax.

That's when I begin to understand that my father is not magically inclined like we are. And that there are secrets so important in my house that no one can admit they exist.

Then again, perhaps by the time we sat down to eat my mum had already forgotten that she knew I'd lit the fire. The woman I knew as my mother was just at the beginning of a long, long process of forgetting everything.

While my mother makes her potions I'm used to stirring my own little pot. The cheerful bubbling of a cauldron is the sound of home, the sound of our shared world. For my pretend-potions I dip into the canisters with the potion ingredients, throwing in different things by color, or all kinds of dried beetles together. It's never truly random. Children play very seriously. Even when I put mushroom caps on the heads of the desiccated lizards and fight battles with them, there is always some logic at work.

At an astonishingly early age I start to be interested in actually emulating my mother's actions to produce the same liquids she does. But because I am a very small child, when nothing turns out right I get frustrated.

"Why is mine purple and yours green?" I ask, pouting.

She smoothes my hair the way that I like.

"Yellow," she points at my liquid.

"Pink," she points at hers.

"But—" I object.

She groups three objects together for several different colors. A dried violet, some fossilized honey, a white powder, she groups as red. Another white powder, the yellow fur from a bumblebee, a black fungus, she calls green. She does the same for blue and yellow while I frown at her.

I am very confused. I know my colors! Is she joking? Is this a game? I move to put the things in the order I think they should go. She holds up a hand in front of my eyes.

"Pink," she says. "Pink. Pink."

She puts something in my hand. "Pink?" she asks.

I shake my head. No, that doesn't feel pink.

She puts a few more things in my palm and I reject them. Then I feel it. "Pink!" She removes her hand from my eyes. There is a dried yellow chrysanthemum in my tiny hand, but I know in a way that I can't explain that it's pink.

Mum kisses my cheek and says "mon tresor," in the way she does when she is very pleased.

The mother I knew was always sparing in speech, so I learned to take her words very seriously. When her speech became so disordered that I couldn't follow it, the odd endearment gleamed like a jewel among the swirling fragments.

There is a point where a potion flashes—or reveals, as we say in the trade—that is the color of is its true nature. When it cools and sets it can be affected by a hundred different things including the container. An unscrupulous chemist can imitate any color by artificial means, but a sorcerer worth his Scrying Salt knows at the moment of the reveal if his solution is sound. A false reveal, as we call it, can be induced if there is any question as to whether a potion you are buying is what its label claims it is.

It is not only at the revealing point that a potion maker should be paying attention to color. In reality, all things have a color that represents their essence and their potential qualities for good or ill. Knowing that a Pig-Nosed Beetle is red, despite its bluish hue, can help prevent one from adding it in a skin salve and potentially causing chemical burns.

What my mother taught me in very few words was an art that many wizards have never even heard of, and only a fraction of a fraction can ever master. Every street-corner charlatan invokes the name of Paracelsus when he hawks his headache salves and levitation lotions and every apothecary has an engraving of the Great Physick in his shop, but only a few among the magical elite understand anything of the man's genius.

The Paracelsan method consists of finding the inner nature of things, and then combining the like with the like to heal illness, increase wisdom and bring harmony to a disordered earth. Anyone gifted with discernment into the nature of the world and the direction that each thing, holy in its own bent, wishes to go can rightly claim to be a disciple of Paracelsus. But the man himself was both doctor and chemist, talented at discerning an illness and concocting the precise compound needed to cure it. He was also a philosopher, which is why some people, my mother among them, call him "Thrice Great," after the originator of magic, Hermes Trismegistus. Most people are not equally gifted at all three, as the founder of our science was, but some are like my mother: gifted at one art and with enough understanding of the natural and philosophical world to understand the application in the other two spheres.

And so somewhere on the rolls of the adepts you will find my mother's name entered thus: Eugenie Sophia Azucena Maranatha Belacqua Laurent Snape, Spagyrist. The study of Spagyrics is the alchemical tradition whose name means to separate and to combine.

That's what potions adepts do, essentially: they construct compounds out of the building blocks that, in various combinations, make up the substance of our world. A potions mistress like my mother was at a great advantage over someone who had to rely on recipe books and measuring, neither of which can take into account the particular qualities of a batch of Hyssop Salt, which may look the same but reacts completely differently if it gets invisibly contaminated with certain other salts.

It's an extraordinarily difficult thing to explain, and many of the alchemical texts that survived to modern times make no sense precisely because you can't really convey in words how a "red" substance feels. And then, it's not as though any of the adepts of old really tried to communicate their concepts: more, their words are a jumble of insults and nonsense which are studded with references to color, but only someone who has actually experienced the inner qualities of a thing knows that they are best summed up in terms of color.

Perhaps it's that my mother and I share some sort of predisposition for the work, but it is also true that we had another advantage: she had a way of planting a concept in my mind, a pure thought without language. It was harder for me to do the same with her since I was a small child without formation, but I could sometimes plant a thought in her mind as well. If we could not communicate in this way, we would have been lost to each other very soon afterwards when she was effectively mute.

With a few words, however, my mother was able to communicate the art of Division, one of the most sought-after skills in the Wizarding world, and it became our favorite game for a while.

It drives my father crazy when at the dinner table all we do is point at things and Divide them by magical color—the milk is pink, the roast is violet and the potatoes are yellow.

When I grasp this concept very well, she moves on to others—cold or hot, active or passive. For the latter concept we take different compounds and smudge the horns of stag beetles with them. The ones with active materials can easily push the others out of the way. This binary is often called moist versus dry, which is another way of saying one substance is more likely to "ignite" into action than another, but again, once you see the qualities in action it doesn't matter what you call them—the proof right there in front of you.

According to the old ways my mother learned in her extensive training, you can also Classify according to mercury, sulfur, and a host of other things that I never really paid much attention to all of that because very quickly my hands were getting the sense of what to do on their own. Letting an herb or salt sit in my palm for a moment I could feel a little prickle when it was the right thing to add.

This was also was right at the same time that my mother was losing her ability to do magic. We were traveling on opposite ends of a parabola, and yet we always saw eye to eye.

"Look, mum!" I say, as my own little cauldron flashes a golden yellow, just the right color for Skin-Stim potion, and then settles into a tawny red. She tries to force hers to a new reveal several times but it's a stubborn blue.

"That's very, very good, baby," she says and lies down early after dinner.

The first potion I learned to make on my own was Dreamless Sleep. It's not an easy one, what with the unstable holly dust that must be mixed just so. Mother had nightmares, and it was also one of the best sellers in the potion service she maintained. As she became more melancholy her potions wouldn't come out right even when she had a clear head. But at the time, she just knew that even the simplest potions she could do blindfolded and with her feet weren't turning out anymore.

"Let me try. Do you cut it like this?" I ask, though I've watched her a hundred times and Wingerman's mallow is of course cut against the grain and in fingernail-sized slices.

"Yes, baby, like that," she says in the voice she uses when she's trying desperately not to scream or fall asleep.

"And this stuff, what is it again?" I say, trying to keep her engaged.

"Borneo lizard-leaf," she says tiredly. "Crush it to a fine powder."

I go through the motions I've helped with here and there before, but this time I'm prompting her memory. It's like the opposite of me eagerly answering her questions about the proper color of braised eel-liver, which as a six-year-old child I knew was supposed to be coral-colored.

"Look mum, we did it," I say excitedly. The cauldron's surface is coated with an opalescent green skin that soon disappears to reveal a lovely emerald color.

"You're right," she says, making a motion to keep stirring but I take the spoon out of her hand before she spoils it. Maybe she's been stirring too much and that's been ruining things. "It's perfect." If a shadow passes across her face when she realizes that a 7-year-old just proved a better potion maker than her, she forgets quickly enough. "We'll tell your Da what a big helper you are tonight."

But somehow that gets put off, because she misplaces her wand and it won't come when she calls, and father comes home to a cold dark house with her crying.

She is spending a lot of time lying down. Stirring the cauldron is getting too exhausting for her and so I stand on a pile of books to reach her full-size cauldron. I am playing my childish games by her bedside and sometimes find her frozen, staring off into the distance, and I can do nothing to rouse her. At first it is frightening, but it soon becomes a fact of life. I play over her, littering the bedsheets with the battles I fight between old buttons and spools, incorporating her into my games when she wakes up.

A lot of my games involve magic queens who had been spelled into some kind of unnatural sleep, and my job as the prince is to figure out the antidote and wake her.

"And the prince looked all over the earth for the potion that would wake the queen," I prattle on, using odds and ends from my mother's workshop as play potions ingredients on her coverlet.

"But he must not look only on the earth, because he is a very special prince, a half-blood prince who belongs as much to the water as to the earth," she says suddenly, waking up from her reverie. She kisses my hair and we play together, her words leading us on adventures in the make-believe world made of packing twine and twisted stoppers for potion phials, bent copper spoons and bits of fabric she makes float in the air like a shimmering castle.

My mother is the best playmate a child could have-when she isn't in that place that makes her stare, or worse, puts that furrow between her brows that makes her look divided from herself. The tears sometimes course unheeded down her cheeks; I know she is often very unhappy, but she tries to spare me from the worst of it. Sometimes she is frightened of the most ordinary things and she'll throw whatever's handy at the boot or the bottle that has her scared out of her wits. The screams from her nightmares have me shivering in my little room many times.

Occasionally my father will come out of the bedroom and shut the door very quietly before turning on me. "You keep quiet—you've already done enough to her today." Maybe that's why, when she's well enough and making mushrooms and dried insects dance for me, my father will, very rarely, sit down on the floor with us. He'll try to grasp the logic of the games, and the three of us sit in those unusual moments, focusing all three on saving the mushroom king from the vengeful race of Malaya ants trying to swarm his kingdom. My father knows this part of my mother is vanishing, and he'll smile at her with an expression that is carefully hidden anguish and let the reanimated ants march over his hand, just to hold onto it for a little while longer.

He doesn't seem to think about what I might do with my time when she is absent, but he needn't worry. During my mother's quiet hours, at the age of 7 I begin filling her potions orders, retracing the steps I've done with her many times before. Her index of potions by magical color is all I need, though I can't read the technical instructions well. I can usually manage to rouse her so she can see the reveal and give me the praise that makes me flash with pride.

"Very good baby," she says, helping me pour the cooled potion into containers when my father walks in the door.

He sees that she's been busy and smiles at both of us. I notice he likes to see the worktable covered with glass beakers. He helps us pour and seal as well, and even applies the paste for the labels that were the first thing I learned how to read.

My mother's potions were sought after all over Europe because she had gone to the famed Invisible School. That was the name of a school of alchemical adepts, but as a small child I thought it was a place where you went to learn to be invisible, and I asked my mother over and over how she learned from invisible books and invisible teachers writing on invisible slates.

Wizards often make things appear and reappear, but the vanishing act that was most present to me was that of my mother, who seemed less substantial by the day. She was justifiably proud of her training, and so the labels we pasted as a family had a space above the hand-lettered names so that when you held them in your hand, a message appeared: "Made specially by Adept Eugenie Laurent Snape, Bonded by the Invisible School." My father made those appear and reappear with his touch and could always get a smile from her.

If he ever fully understood how much of the work I did on my own, he didn't comment upon it. To him, magic was something "my kind" just did—so a boy of seven playing a greater or lesser role in the preparation of volatile fluids was a matter of course, the way he'd always been good with plants.


	2. Chapter 2

The Pelican's Bequest Book 1 / Chapter 2: An Uneasy Solution

The three of us lived in an old stone house, part of the original wizarding village called Bittenbrook established right near Dover centuries ago. With Calais so close across the channel, my mother's family was not the only one that considered itself more French than English.

Perhaps with my mother's help it would have blended fine, but with her illness there was one solution I couldn't keep blended on my own: the two sides of my family that kept an uneasy proximity. My mother's family was one of the only things my father and I could agree on. We didn't like them, though he wasn't the one that had to spend several afternoons a week with them, fidgeting in a velvet robe with lace cuffs and collar. Before I understood the benefits of hiding under a shapeless garment, I was terrified of robes. You couldn't see the threat coming. In a moment, grand-mère's wand emerged from the folds of cloth and was smiting me for any number of offenses.

"Don't grab like a ruffian, boy, where are your manners?" she snaps because I gobble up cakes with candied fruit so unlike the plain stews that were my father's contribution to the household.

So that someone could care for my mother, we went to my grand-mère's splendid old house several afternoons a week. While grand-mère talked to her daughter, reminding her of old times, brushing her hair, caring for the skin problems none of her own famous salves could cure, I was expected to attend lessons or at least not be underfoot. I was to act like a prince in the robes I couldn't take home because they were too fine, and above all I was to speak French.

"Oui grand-mère. Non, grand-mère. Un petit gateau, s'il vous plaît, grand-mère."

When I spoke in English my grandmother would swell my hand almost to bursting or hex me a horn in the middle of my forehead and then give me the run of her spectacular library to figure out how to fix it. I had picked up the basics of reading while poring over my mother's recipe books, but my knowledge advanced quickly with the extra incentive of the afflictions she visited upon me. "Detumesce" and "Eruption" were two early additions to my vocabulary.

"Your mother was always so good, so delicate," my grandmother says fondly as if my mother isn't right there having her hair plaited, and then a sharp edge always pokes through. "You don't want to end up like her, do you?" She peers in my eyes every visit and always sees something she doesn't like. "For a man, it would be even more unseemly."

She instills in me the fear of whatever she saw that might presage a future degeneration that seems expected of me. I don't know enough to be afraid of congenital madness so she teaches me what it is—"It's like those black herons that very rarely turn white and forget how to fly."

My mother lies there tracing the pattern on the carpet with one hand while dipping her fingers in a goblet of water and trailing them to her lips as a manner of drinking with the other. She looks for all the world like a bird that has forgotten how to fly. Everything I love about her becomes dangerous, somehow, in the presence of her mother. It makes me fear liking stories and chopping things and laughter and being the opposite of my father, whose insensitivity helped put bread on the table.

Except I helped earn for the household since a very young age. He must have known and that's why he hated me so much.

My father is employed by wizards who need someone to tend gardens full of plants that can be harmful for the magically inclined. He can pull up mandrakes, for instance, and not hear a sound, and the Boring White Weevil completely ignores his skin. He is also a muggle gardener, and must have been a very good one because he could coax fruit trees to produce on the little plot outside our unhappy house, though I often made the cherry trees produce potatoes or other such pranks that made him furious until finally he gave up.

Above all, I remember his hands. They were always meticulously clean. Proudly dull.

His was the reverence for cleanliness born of the working class. Father was an orphan brought up by strict distant relations he couldn't bear to remember so he didn't. He had me scrubbing floors and sweeping cobwebs out of rafters every weekend as we united in our war against the house.

As my mother fell ill, the house seemed to decline with her. Looking back, my father must have seen the magical house ganging up on him because he was a muggle, or maybe he saw it as a symbol of my mother's madness, because he used every spare moment to attack the unpredictable symptoms of decay. One day, we would wake up and the door would be facing out into the narrow space leading to the neighbor's house, so that we had to climb out the window. Another day, all of his socks would be in the potion ingredient canisters, or the water would flow up from the tap instead of down. It was impossible to keep anything tidy, and this enraged my father because of his innate love of order.

One of the things he hated most about my mother's problem was that he had to ask me, the only other magical being in the house, to do the slightest tasks that the headstrong dwelling had taken out of his control. I used my mother's wand to regulate the temperature and fix the leaks that often appeared in the roof. Some of the only physical contact I ever had with my father was when he had me climb on his shoulders and point the wand my mother couldn't use anymore at the wizard wallpaper that wouldn't stick to the walls.

"Hold it higher! Higher, useless boy!" he would shout at me as he tried to stick it back up with every adhesive known to muggle or wizard. My small boy's arm would get tired from the effort, but he didn't understand that magic was a little more than pointing a stick at something, and he would hold my arm up until it burned.

Eventually he gave up and we had painted walls. We painted them constantly, in fact, as if we could cover over my mother's illness together. Afterwards my father would make me use the wand to clean his hands the magical way, and he would admire the perfect clean with a relieved expression on his face before the usual stony expression closed over it again. It was the only time I could point a wand at him under pain of unspecified torments I never doubted he would make good on.

If the house seemed to hate us, it could also be wonderful. I so seldom went to the sea because my mother needed to rest, but I did love the water. One day she showed me the magical river that flowed underneath our house, and the chuckling sound of the water in our secret sub-cellar ensured that I never missed going out again.

Like most magical houses, the rafters also stretched much farther than you would guess from the outside. The legend goes that during a wizarding war that's where they kept secret gardens for food. The small boy that I was would scale the beams and vines stretching far up into the attics, fetching useful lichens and mosses from above and floating them down to my mother below. Then we would do the same in the cellar, sitting by the magical river and an odd pale kind of grass that grew around it. My mother's owl would bring back many of our potions ingredients just by following the waterway to all sorts of magical wildlife. What we couldn't gather, she ordered. I learned to copy the labels on the canisters that were empty, and my father would sometimes sit with me and help me match the ingredients we required with the word that needed to be written out.

Now I can grasp what it must have been like for him, a muggle who had seen too many things to go back to the world as he knew it, with a mad wife and a child he couldn't see any of himself in.

His wife was more and more unreachable, but me, I had enough of him in me to see him in all of his frustration and impotence, and he hated that. It was like living with an avalanche in slow motion, watching my mother's decline, and it might have been better had he left. As a child I assumed he only stayed with us because he was terrified of mum's family exacting some awful retribution for abandoning the marriage they never approved of. To be a muggle married to a witch in those days was to be a second-class citizen, or a subhuman life form in the eyes of an Old Family such as the Laurents, or worse yet the Belacqua clan on my grandmother's side, who claimed to be related to Jacques de Molay, the famous adept who was burned at the stake. Through de Molay, who was of the Knights Templar, she finagled a connection to the Rosicrucians-L'Ancien et Mystique Ordre de la Rose-Croix-and thus could claim a privileged connection to most of the occult traditions of Western Europe.

How two people from such different backgrounds ever got together is still beyond me. The first thing I knew of love was that it was senseless and terribly, terribly unjust. And for those very reasons difficult to leave.

"Sevvie—darling boy, do you have—is there any?" my mother asks with that furrow between her brows. I have begun experimenting with my own refinements to her recipes, and sometimes they make her a little intoxicated. Anything to bring a false cheer and temporary blush to her pale cheek. I would experiment on the mice or on myself to make sure that I didn't hurt her, which left me more than once with my nose drooping into my plate at the dinner table, a bit drunk from too much of a calming agent.

"There, mum, you look so pretty like that, let me fix your hair the way you like it," I say, careful to be aware of my father's step should he come home. He has taken the wand away because he thinks that's what I'm using to interfere with his fruit trees, but the fact is, I don't always need a wand to do magic.

Once he caught me making sparkling wisps out of thin air using just my hands—I couldn't make them last long, but my mother liked it when I adorned her neck and wrists before a cracked mirror.

"There mum, tell me a story," I beg while the sparkles catch her attention for a moment.

She would start out like the old days, "There once was a queen who was also a witch, and she got lost in a garden. It was a very small garden and for that so much harder to get out of. If she could only find the wizard who placed her there she would cut out his tongue and make a jelly to spread on toast, no it would turn into a lizard that would lead her home again," and she would drift off and I would tell her the story.

"This story is about a queen who had prince who loved her very much but he had a curse cast on him and was invisible so she didn't see him handing her the goblet and only felt the lightest of flutters on her check when he kissed her—she thought it was a Mantis moth but really what she needed was spectacles."

She watched me with rapt attention, perhaps grasping the images I tried to place in her mind more than the words. And I transported us awhile with a magic my father couldn't take away.

I've spent much of my life being angry about a childhood that didn't register as deprived until it was suddenly over. But ultimately I've decided it was just one of those things—an unhappy confluence of factors that resulted in a small boy shouldering caregiving and work responsibilities far beyond his years, and then being forced into an elaborate charade to pretend like it wasn't happening.

If my father wasn't such a proud man, maybe he would have asked for help, but he was terrified of someone taking her away and locking her in an asylum. My father had banned my mother's family from our house, something I could completely understand—but maybe if they had seen the walls tilting crazily around us they would have intervened. Then again, my grandmother's attachment to keeping up appearances was so profound that she steered my mother around town once a month under the Imperius Curse, just to prove that her daughter wasn't actually a lunatic.

Sometimes I join them on these bizarre errands, getting my mother fitted for clothes or picking up a box of phials being just a pretext for showing that my mother was together enough to be making the potions that still left our house by owl at regular intervals. Now I see that on some level grand-mère must have realized that I was filling the orders, but she was devoted to creating the best illusion possible, which always starts with oneself.

Hercula Belacqua Laurent was a very exclusive conjurer who created illusions for fancy parties, mostly across the channel on the continent. Grandmother was one of the only people with the ability and permission to apparate across a body of water. The things she brought out of thin air were a wonder to behold: she could conjure almost anything, as long as it didn't have to last. But it was amazingly detailed while it did.

Grand-mère could conjure an orchestra's worth of instruments that would play themselves and knew all the works of Mozart. She could make the most intricate chandeliers made out of Sorilla bugs flying their glowing bellies in concert. Once I saw her make an archway for a wedding made of rushing water with fish and seahorses playing. That must be why she could animate my mother for short periods of time.

But like Cinderella's ball, one of the many stories she enchanted and horrified me with, don't ask her to make anything that is real or lasting.

If there is one person I manage to blame at least once a day for the rest of my life, however, it's my Aunt Adele.

Adele, one of my mother's two sisters, never married. She worked as a private tutor in muggle and wizard languages and gave lessons out of my grandmother's house. She was very aware of her intelligence, which was sharp enough to keep grand-mère with her encyclopedic knowledge of magic at bay much of the time. She was also very aware of her ugliness, which she carried like a weapon. In fact, I learned the art of shielding from her, just by imitation. I once tried a tantrum on her in a lesson and she turned it back on me with just a look—cold, bored almost—and then I felt wet and cold. I was. She made me piss myself by throwing all my frustration back at me and then sucking all the joy out of my nearly joyless world with just a look, by staring at me like a disgusting creature that had somehow managed to perch on the velvet chair next to her.

I've been thankful for her example more than once. Adele taught me that the world isn't fair and if you're smart you'll be ready to turn someone's stupidity back on them, because an attack was just around the corner.

She was a more likely mother for me than her sister Eugenie, my beautiful, playful and mild-mannered mother. Adele and I were both ugly in the same way, raw-boned with a nose that had been a distinction on our male forebears a few generations back and yet never ended up settling well on my face. Supposedly we had Spanish blood not too far back, and that would make sense, because there was a certain passionate quality to the ugliness, worn better or worse by the relatives I've met—worse by her, better and with a haughty air by my grandmother, and afflicting my other aunt to a lesser degree.

In some of the portraits hanging in the huge old house they lived in, my other relations had the same quality, what I now think of as this igneous look, like something uncanny that came from inside the earth and shouldn't have seen the light of day. Aunt Adele had a face like a stalactite, and she had a mineral gaze to match. These two gargoyle-women, grandmother and aunt, so unlike my mother, were the only protectors I knew, even if they were never shy in expressing their poor opinion of me. And if I sometimes caught them sitting like gargoyles out of the corner of my eye, it never occurred to me that I might look the same.

There was a claustrophobic kind of rancor between Adele and my grandmother in that house. Her mother never stopped reminding her of her ugliness that kept her from marrying, which Aunt Adele threw back at her for having given her the assemblage of features that sat so poorly together. With all of her strictness and occasional cruelty my aunt must have been teaching me the only real knowledge she had: how to exist in our airless little family, because after all what did she know of the world? She was a prodigy who never fully left home, and the lessons she had for me were about withstanding family vendettas in the long term.

But there was much more to the world than that, than being a snide little girl who grew up and taught other snide children. And Aunt Adele must have known what was going on under her prodigious nose.

She was fascinating—her nose moved when she talked and when she chewed, but she was also regal like a queen. Most of all, I was transfixed by Adele's hands. They were big, mannish hands, terrible hands that were never still. They were perpetually animated in some macabre dance like the magical antecedents of flamenco. What I was seeing was actually the rare achievement that is wandless magic. This rarest of gifts propelled Aunt Adele's hands, and she was the adept who could have taught me to use my own gift at a young age. But instead she told me she had a palsy, and that's why her hands were never still. They were like a familiar in her lap—as if they were stroking an invisible cat that was in fact her same hands. Sometimes they gave the impression that she was knitting with invisible yarn.

Adele listened calmly to her mother's habitual abuse about being too ugly to attract a suitor, and I gradually understood that she was using this mindless hatred of her mother's, feeding off of it, was almost grateful for the focus hate gave her. She would cock an eyebrow at me and make a tiny gesture with her hands. Then she was in my mind. Only she or my grandmother had this gift, besides my mother. Adele could plant an idea in my mind and then I'd understand: "There you have it; use the unpleasantness in life or it will kill you."

My other aunt, my mother's sister Petronile, I saw very seldom. She was decently pretty in an unconventional way and did regularly send me hand-me-downs from her sons. She was clearly uncomfortable around me, but no one had the grace to tell me why. I found out when I was ten that she had a revulsion for me because of something I did as an infant. I had taken her wand away from her while she was mid-spell, simply by moving my hands. Petronile was superstitious enough to believe dark wizards are born, not made. Her boys had never done anything like that, but then they had normal, healthy magician parents to channel their magic. Whereas there was enough free-floating magic in my house to peel the paint off the walls.

I understand now that muggle children with magical tendencies are often labeled as violent because their parents don't understand where their power comes from. But all this I learned many years after I was already a darkish wizard on the path to a full eclipse.

"What's that swill you're making? Don't give it to her. How do you know it's not poison? Let's see." When my father takes an interest in what I'm brewing he usually accuses me of poisoning my mother. He forces me to choke some of my experimental new Soothing Skin potion down my throat. It's just my mother's tried and true recipe with a few refinements. This version has a kick, I discover. It makes my skin feel good, warm, loved—the way my mother's touch used to when she stroked my hair. I had only noticed that my experimental mice liked to be petted after drinking it. The cold-blooded little scientist I was merely was interested in their fur not falling out and that they didn't drop dead. Choking down the potion I felt more intensely what only my small sip had done before. Fatally, I started to laugh.

"You think this a laughing matter, boy?" he roars at me and starts beating me with a copper spoon, then whipping me with a frenzy when I look straight into his eyes and laugh delightedly. It wasn't unusual for him to hit me with something—never his bare hand—but on this occasion my behavior earned me stripe after stripe across my backside. It felt so good. It was my first real brush with an abuse of my potions ability. I reserved this recipe for my personal use and took it regularly until the repeated ingestion caused a lack of coordination and I started walking into walls and my fingernails fell off.

The only child my own age I ever saw was my distant cousin, Veronica. I suppose I should be thankful for her because without this hated addition to my lessons I wouldn't have learned how to fight and school would have been even harder. She was one of Adele's charges from a branch of the family not so much in decline, and she was a genius at only one thing: ridicule.

She made fun of my clothes with good reason, because the frilly velvet robe grand-mére reserved for my use was ridiculous. But she also made fun of my long hair, which was never cut because both my mother and my grandmother had prophetic dreams to that effect just after I was born. She pointed out all the things I didn't know about polite wizarding society, such that it wasn't polite to cast a revealing spell on someone even if they had concealed a Woolly Bumpus-worm in their pocket with the intention of putting it down your robes. That stuffing my pockets with the rich foods from grandmother's larder was called stealing. Most of all she taught me that my mixed parentage was a source of shame for the family.

"Muggle. Mudblood."

The insults were endless. It was quite the phenomenon to watch her making up new ways to sting me. It was like Veronica inherited my grandmother's ability to create wondrous illusions out of nothing, but they could only be made out of insults.

This girl had never even met my father, as far as I knew, and just the fact that my mother chose him, for whatever strange reason she did, was enough to make me fight back at the sheer idiocy of it.

A Small Selection of Cousin Veronica's Genius

Slurs organized by category:

Animals (so chosen for having a mixed color, or one color that turns into a second over time, or disharmonious features): Portnoy's Peacock, Grouse Owl, Hipponymph, Great Fantailed Auk, Sorrel Swallow, Nigerian Ibis, Heraldic Nighthawk, Siroccan Minibat, Bindymane, Haberstaff, False Woodpecker, Rogue Drabbermouse, Whiling Half-crest, Wheedling Hackrat, Mongrel. Mule. Scattersilk Nimbleruffed Half-bird.

Which brings us to…

The less-than-wholes: Half-blood. Unfinished boy. Pseudosnake beetle. Hermaphrodite (here, she clearly did not know the meaning of the word), scant-dram (used by potions makers to indicate slightly less than a dram, but also slang for a cheat), scrounge-handed, shrink-fisted. Mélange

The monsters: Ogre, Widdlywhack, Garishee, Aberbang Dandaroo, Basilisk, Harpy, Siren, Cerberus, Hydra, Cyclops, Simpersill, Addler, Confundabaculum, Hastewaste,

Blood traitor.

This last epithet she picked up somewhere, not realizing it referred to my mother. She got such a smite from grandmother for that—no one criticizes her girls besides their mother.

In return I used Cousin Veronica as a guinea pig for all the attack spells I was learning from grand-mère and my aunt. I didn't know about Veritaserum—what I would have done to the little pigtailed bitch if I could have wrung her childish secrets from her—but I could cast a spell that made your eyes cross for an hour after you told a lie. Or made her slap herself after she made fun of my hair.

The lessons we shared were excruciating, especially because our aunt favored her. Or so I thought. Adele never corrected my cousin's grammar, her spells or her posture. She mostly sat back with her unnerving smile and let us antagonize each other up to the point of drawing blood, like a lioness might sit back and watch her cubs nearly maul each other to death.

Now I see that she gave very easy questions to Veronica, who was two years older than I and rather thick, while to me, she was always looking pointedly at me while wringing her hands. Wringing, wringing, wringing her hands. If I didn't get the right answer I would sulk about it until I knew what she meant, so in this way she managed to teach me the rudiments of arithmetic and some random bits of history of magic. I blame her for not doing more than making me parrot the most useless pieces of information (who cares what the name of the inventor of Floo powder was?) with as much understanding as a trick pony.

Even at that age I don't like someone to take the piss, and I have the vague awareness that my Aunt Adele is constantly laughing at my expense. Yet I also crave her company and the intellectual distractions it provides from my home life.


	3. Chapter 3

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 3: The Augury

Have you been encouraging her again?"

My father comes home to find my mother singing wordlessly to a couple of bits of ribbon she's playing with. Oh, how he must have dreaded walking through that door and seeing what new degeneration she had gone through since he'd left. He never drank. He never stayed out all night. But my father has a breaking point, and this night he has reached it seeing my mother with her nightdress falling off her shoulder completely immersed in her own private world.

Unluckily, I'm trying to join her in her game to make it less grotesque. "La la la," I try to sing with her.

"You."

"We're just—"

"Just what."

There's truly no justifying the scene, so I fall silent.

He ties me up with my hands behind my back. "That's the way you'll stay. And you won't get this back either," he says, taking away the wand that I have come to think of as half-mine. That's what I bring to lessons, what I use to light the fire and perform the household chores he sets for me. He knows this. But as a muggle, my father doesn't understand the powerful and supposedly unique bond a witch should have with her wand. He also doesn't realize that the wand will come to me if I call, as long as I'm standing close enough, because it has long since stopped doing so for my mother. Even as angry as he is this night, he knows better than to break it, because mother would have a hard time choosing another wand, and we need her potions (my potions) for money.

It's not the first time he's restrained me, but this time my father has used some rope he has no idea is charmed, but it must be. It's packing string from a package that housed one of the ingredients we order. Wizard string—strong, unbreakable when locked by a spell-even without that additional magic, a few minutes' struggle shows me there is no hope of escape. It's making my wrists are more numb than other times he's tied me up, probably because it's a magical cord, not because the knots are so much tighter than normal. My father's a gardener, after all, not a sailor.

He's a gardener who's at his wit's end because of my mother's advancing illness—even as a child of eight or nine I know this, but the idea that my fingers will fall off from lack of circulation starts to horrify me. I peer to the ground to see how many fingers have dropped off.

I start to cry. Silently, hoping he doesn't notice. He has a sixth sense and is there in a moment. "The young master doesn't like the look of this, does he? Not quite the treatment he gets from grand-mère" (he spits the French pronunciation). "Well if she actually gave a damn about you she'd take you herself. Leave your mother with one less thing to worry about." At the moment, my mother's only worry appears to be how coax music from spider webs.

"She says you won't let her," I retort, having listened to several conversations above my head at the big old house.

He chortles, and I feel his breath move my hair. My father smells of potatoes and freshly cut grass. "That's what she tells you, does she? I wish I could get shut of you, nasty little shrinking ponce. But your mother, she forbade it, before… "

And then the subject of the woman before her illness, and that she has an illness, is slammed closed with a bang. He leaves me there and once he seems ready for bed I begin to call the wand, but it must have been under something heavy. I am desperate to feel my hands again, to count my fingers. The hysteria hardens into a kind of shape, a cold-hot shape twisting deep inside of me. It twists and writhes and suddenly the rest of my body mirrors the shape, like a question mark. Suddenly the bonds break and the blood rushes painfully into my hands. They are an awful color and I have to smash one of my jars of Skin-Stim Salve by dropping it from a shelf so that I can spread it on my hands with my feet.

My father must have heard the crash but he didn't come to investigate. If he had, he would have seen me using my newly harnessed power to arrange my body in a shape that will hex his shoes into going the wrong direction from where he wants to go.

My new nervous tic involves counting my fingers obsessively to make sure they're all there. This gives rise to teasing from Veronica, who says I look like a Mantis Moth worrying my hands like that. But worse, the incident causes nightmares that will last the rest of my life. Dreams about my fingers falling off and turning into worms that burrow into my flesh. Dreams where I count my fingers and there are too few or far, far too many.

What angers me the most about my father taking out his frustrations on me is that we both know my mother can't survive without me. Who would have made a game out of eating so that she doesn't waste away so quickly? "Pretend you're a baby whale and you eat bubble soup," I instruct her, forming the plain both into bubbles that she scoops up with her mouth, laughing. It's messy but effective. Who would keep her hair long tamed, the last thing that was the same from the woman he married? Who would keep her from harming herself when she gets angry that the wand won't obey her? Above all, who knows the potions that keep her stranded on a tiny calm island in the middle of the advancing oceans of bad feelings—melancholy, anxiety, impotent rage?

She floats on the chemical island I have made for her and when she very rarely says my name it is all worth it.

THE AUGURY

One day my grandmother takes Cousin Veronica and me to a visiting augurer. He cuts open the birds and pokies around in their entrails with a flourish, trying to impress us children. But if there is one quality that seems constant in my family, it's an imperviousness to things designed to impress. Veronica and I merely stare at him and my grandmother looks down her splendid nose at this man she has told us is little better than the traveling wand-salesmen.

The augurer sighs and gives his reading of Veronica's bird-liver first. She is told all the expected things about a good marriage, successful career and healthy children, and the little minx shoots me a smug look just like she does when she gets an easy answer correct during lessons.

Then I choose my bird and feel sorry when he cuts it open and stirs the hot, bloody mass.

"Well," my grandmother demands. "So, what do you see?"

The man throws the dead thing into the fire hurriedly and wipes his hands.

"Don't cut his hair," he says as an afterthought while he rinses off the knife.

"We already know that!" She fixes him with her best glare, which is something to see. "Will he be a great magician?"

The man coughs and reaches for a tankard of water. "Oh, yes, he has the potential to be" he shakes his head—"a great wizard." He makes it sound like a curse.

"The potential?" Grand-mère repeats. "Meaning either that or he'll be a two-trick mountebank at a muggle carnival?"

The man looks caught. "No, I can assure you, madam, he will be a great wizard."

"What then? I want my two galleons' worth."

Then the man turns his eyes on me and gives me a look that will become "That Look" when I see it many times throughout my life. My neck itches for some reason. I'm the half-breed and thus not very promising, is what I assume he means. It's what Veronica thinks he means, and she kicks me delightedly under the table. Maybe we can go back to the sea before going in, I think hopefully.

"Don't cut his hair," the augurer says with finality and begins to shut up his tent to get rid of us.

When I am nine I finally find the wizard photographs of my parents before I was born.

My father was so orderly he could tell from the way the pictures were arranged that I'd gotten into them. "Did you find what you were lookin' for, boy?" When I go back and steal one for myself, he doesn't say anything.

In the picture I spend hours studying, my father's features are the same, but he is a different man. The rather high cheekbones and square face signify a healthy kind of stability. I have to admit—in the suit that seems to inhibit his movements, he looks to be just the man for her in a way even a child can sense. In the photo my mother is pulling him away and laughing, but my father is lingering, looking straight at the camera as if he's trying to tell his future self something very important.

I stopped hexing my father's belongings after that. I even managed to repair most of the fruit trees. He is more of a man to me once I can see that this horrible losing battle in which we're sometimes enemies, sometimes compatriots, had started with something good.

And how could I argue with my father's desperate attempts to keep my mother from being taken away from us? There were no doctors that I could remember ever coming to the house, though apparently my father had taken my mother to muggle and wizard doctors until he at last grasped that if he kept begging them to help they'd put her in a hospital for good.

We also had to put aside our differences because it is my father and I united against a common enemy—the house. Neither of us knew how a wizard house really works. Sometimes they will stay intact long after the inhabitants are gone if they've imbued it with their strength and magic; sometimes magical homes fall apart quickly. This last can happen either because the owner wishes it to and thus withdrew the symbiotic energy he or she had invested in the structure, or the house can fall into ruin out of sympathy, loyalty or even mourning.

Sometimes a house falls apart with you in it. That's what happened to us. My mother's magic just wouldn't do what she wanted, leaving me, a boy of 6, to wrestle with a furious muggle and yards of wizard wallpaper, and then the rest of the time with some part of the house in the midst of being painted. Father hated the mess but by the end of it we were living with the coats of paint underneath flaking off the stone. The multicolored chips would float down slowly so it was like we were living suspended in confetti or apple blossoms in an eternal and unhealthy spring. When I think about my childhood, everything is summed up in these floating bits showing us that we are living in the aftermath of the explosion of my mother's mind.

"Make it stop till I'm finished," my father says without looking at me—he tries to look at me as little as possible. This time he's having me ward off the tiny paint chips because he's trying to fix the clocks again, and the paint gets in the works.

I sulk and point a wand over his head until my arm is tired. I let it fall and he keeps working, engrossed in his battle against the clocks whose arms spin wildly in all directions but refuse to keep time. Sometimes I picture cutting my wand-arm off and giving it to him as a present so he can do all the things that are so important to him, like keeping the crockery on the shelves instead of having it wander all over the house, or at least have it come when he calls.

But then I wouldn't be able to defend mum against the insects. She taught me from a young age that there are many useful insects. In one of my earliest memories I sat on her lap and held the Fillybees in my tiny hands while she milked them into a potion. My father, on the other hand, can't abide the many and varied magical flies, beetles, moths and other pests, even though they completely ignore him. I'm the one that suffers a welt every time a barometer beetle gets its pincers on me faster than I can toss it into the cauldron. But the stoic man who is the symbol of all that is pigheaded and threatening doesn't even bother to hide that his fear of magical creatures increases exponentially with the number of legs.

My father builds a screened chamber for his wife to sleep in, which in her more lucid moments terrifies her as the cage that it is. But when she is lost to the world, he puts it up because my childish spells won't last through the night, and sometimes we wake up to Mantis Moth larvae crawling on her. They're beautiful creatures but everyone knows they feed on madness, and neither he nor I will have that, though of course it's somehow my fault that they appear out of nowhere to begin with.

"Useless boy, you're not trying hard enough. You want those—things—having at your own mother?"

I look at the glowing blue and green wisps that will become the large moths that give the impression that they are rubbing their hands delightedly while they drink. They, too, will be frequent visitors in my nightmares.

"Maybe I can put something on her, some kind of salve," I suggest.

"And mark her skin? I don't trust you Look what you did to yourself." There's a scar on my left hand from where he interrupted me while I was boiling Gumsap Juice. In all but the second stage it's perfectly harmless, but he would call for me while I was bringing it to the critical point, just to harangue me about some trifle or other.

The next time she is more or less aware I ask mother, "Do the moths bother you?" She gives me an awful look but says nothing. "How do you keep them away?" I ask her, hoping that she will put an idea in my head like she does sometimes.

An hour or so later I realize she's wandered over to the pantry and is looking at the Pine Barren Mist we keep in a jar but which I've never used. I put a little in my hand and move it back and forth—from the left one to the right and back again several times. I've noticed that if I use both hands it's easier to Divise the qualities of a substance. It is definitely an orange, active, with a stabilizing warmth. Much the same as the inner nature of the Mantis Moths, I realize now, having always despised the creatures so much I'd never thought to catch one and find out for myself.

I make a base potion and then let some of the mist waft into it and seal it with Drowsing Worm tail.

The salve works for a while but then a wind whips through the house and after it calms the larvae are back. Like everything else over the years, I have to keep adjusting my recipes as her magic changes and warps.

One day when I must have been nearly ten, I am watching my aunt's hands idly during a lesson, when it occurred to me that whatever we were actually talking about—in this case something about the geography of middle earth, I recall—was not actually what we were talking about. I watch her unfortunate palsy and feel like this is where the real conversation is happening. She merely stares back at me but I can finally tell that something is going on between us that priggish Cousin Veronica is completely unaware of. My hands are making slight movements of their own—something I'd never realized before. What are we talking about? Compared to her ugly claws my hands look graceful and soft, though I know they are raw from potions and chopping.

I start paying more attention to my aunt and less to the content of the lessons—they were becoming somewhat easier—and I realize that I feel safer with Aunt Adele than with anyone. Like she understands things about me and maybe would explain them if I ask the right questions.

The only thing that comes out when I try, though, is "Why can't I stay with you?"

She looks down at me. For a woman Aunt Adele is very tall, which does nothing but accentuate all her rough contours. "What would I do with a little boy?" she asks in horror as if I just asked her to adopt a wild Hell Boar.

"You could give me puzzles and teach me things," I say, thinking she must get as much enjoyment out of imparting knowledge as I get out of learning it.

"Do you think I play games all the time, child? Someone has to work in this family. How do you think your grandmother keeps up appearances? The great age of spectacle is over and her services are rarely called upon anymore. Besides, you have a home," she says with finality.

"But it's—" Everything in my life has been to preserve my home and hide its decay, so that it's hard for me to begin to describe what it is like.

"Yes well, it's what you've got, and you wouldn't be you somewhere else," she says.

Around that little nugget the pearl of my life's fatalism begins to grow.

Death is the mother of tinctures, for tinctures proceed from the mortification of the body, in which the colors are contained, even as in a seed there are green, yellow, black, blue, and purple colors, which are, nevertheless, invisible until the seed has perished in the earth, and till the sun has prepared and produced them, so that what was first hidden from the senses is now revealed to them

- De Icteritiis, in The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus

It could have been a bad batch of lichens. It could have been a Bellincubus fly. It could have been prolonged exposure to the Flower of Antimony she put in her magic hair pomade (I've perfected it since; you can substitute Chimeric Alum). Why did they all assume it was I who brought about my mother's early death? For years I struggled to voice the unspoken idea that colored my childhood—that carrying me or giving birth to me weakened my mother, setting events in motion that killed her around the age of 35.

My mother has scarcely said an intelligible word for over two years. On the rare occasion when she puts a thought into my head, it is usually garbled and frightening. She spends her time chattering at things that aren't there, and sometimes she seems to be in pain—psychic or physical, I can't tell.

We feed her gruel with a long spoon. At this point I begin to miss the way my father used to take out his anger on me because I wonder when I'm going to start having to feed him as well. He is absolutely defeated, yet he must be working because he brings home a paycheck. He leaves the house to me, cooking to me, he even accepts food from his mother-in-law.

Then one day I see the shadow.

It's a shadow of something greenish that floats over my mother's form. At first I can't tell if it's on top of the skin, just above it, or underneath. It skitters around her form and she writhes as if in pain. I give her a calming potion and she gibbers more or less peacefully. I watch closely, however, and I become convinced that this is the root of her madness. That she is possessed by some evil force or perhaps has a parasite of some sort. Every minute I can spend researching it in my grandmother's library is added to all the time I spend in mother's reference books. It feels the same color that it looks – green, with a hint of pink. It doesn't feel malevolent, in fact, but when it is active she is prone to screaming.

Keeping this green invader calm with potions is all right, but one day I get the idea of turning it out. A magical exorcism, so to speak. It's back to the books again, and I find various references to such a procedure but it seems too dangerous. I wish I had someone to ask but they all treat me like a child. As with all of my potions explorations, I have the vague idea that it wouldn't do to let people know how deep I've gotten into the magical sciences.

It's mid-January. Christmas has come and gone without any notice other than a dry history tome from Aunt Adele, a ruffled blouse that I'm not allowed to take home with me from my grandmother, and a package of candied fruits and some sturdy shoes that are too small from my Aunt Petronile. I split them down the back seam and wear them as clogs while I shuffle from the kitchen to the storeroom, getting ingredients for the potions I make while my mother dozes on a cot nearby.

One day I am feeding her and she starts to choke.

I am frantic. The green thing is hovering around her throat. It's killing her! A roar rises up out of my stomach. I grab our wand from where I've been using it to cook her gruel, and I point it at the thing, saying words in some language I've never heard but that reverberate in my toes.

The green thing flies out of her and hits me in the chest, knocking me several feet backward. When I get up I feel as though I am towering over my mother, that I have the power to cure her. I see that she can breathe again. Normally. My heart leaps with the hope that I have delivered her of her sickness. "Mum! Everything's all right now," I say, gathering her in my arms as if she weighs nothing.

"Severus," she says my name.

She breathes her last breath.

My father finds the two of us when he comes home. We're both huddled under a blanket on the kitchen table, splattered with gruel. I have the wand pointed at her and am hexing away the hundreds of Mantis Moths that are swarming around her.

"What did you do?" he screams, a feral scream that even today makes me feel like a monster. He throws me, and the wand that I won't unhand, across the room. Then he gathers my mother gently in the blanket and runs out into the street.

The story goes that my father had to be pried off my mother's corpse by five strong men. A wizard doctor is called and he examines my mother from where she has been laid out at my grandmother's house. Only when he wants to see the scene of her death does anyone think of me. I'm huddled in a corner with the wand in my hand, and I point it at the strange man when he steps into the kitchen. He keeps one eye on me and gives me as wide a berth as possible to walk to the parlor. He shuts the door to make a Floo-call from our long-cold hearth. I can hear him say, among many grown-up words I can't understand:

"Poison."

"Draining the life out of her!"

"An outrage!"

"Someone is to blame!"

"No idea what magical forces at work"

"Dangerous amount of power"

"Needs to be put on the right path by force if necessary"

"Can't blame his own nature"

"Congenital, I'm sure of it!"

Every exclamation that reaches me from the next room is a confirmation of my guilt, my oddity and the assurance of my eventual madness. The police or the aurors or somebody is going to come for me to try and force me to be a better boy, but I won't go without a fight. Mother would want me here to continue her business. She would be proud of me, some childish part of my mind insists, while another knows that nothing will ever be all right again, and this wizard-doctor is the beginning of all that is not right.

He comes out of the parlor and into the kitchen, walking unnaturally slowly, and comes to stand as far from me as possible. The man is wearing a carefully neutral expression, but I can see he's taking in the mess, the layers of dirt on the floor, the mixture of potion-making pots in the sink with the food dishes. The garland of dragonflies threaded together and hanging from the rafters. His eyes linger on the clothing that has made its way into the cutlery drawer. "That happens sometimes," I say defensively. "I'll put it back in the bedroom."

He steals a glance at me while he watches the paint chips swirl around us and he is giving me That Look. The same look as the augurer, the one that made my neck itch. From an adult perspective looking back on the scene, I try to identify this pity or wonder or distaste from when it first began to plague my life. Is he impressed at what lengths people will go to when dissembling? Is he appreciating just how wrong things can go once they start to unravel? Is he shocked that a boy has been running a household and that it's not more squalid than it is? Probably a little of all these things is going into the look, but there's something else I can't begin to put finger on other than it's a kind of fear. I hate that look.

"Stop looking at me like that!" I shout at him, wand at the ready.

He wheels on me and speaks in rapid-fire French. "Did you ever think of testing her magical signature to see if she was hyperreactive to the metallic solutions you so favor? Don't you know that magic can't be merely drained? That it shouldn't be diverted from where it wants to go? Did you cast a trident? Consult Aberthwack and Twick's Cyclopaedia of Magical Correspondences?" He suddenly realizes that he is berating a boy of ten. A boy who has just watched his mother die in this very room.

The doctor motions for me to follow him out into the front yard. There are neighbors looking out their windows. The man attempts a smile while standing as far from me as he can. "How long have you been making her potions?"

"I've been helping as long as I can remember. By myself since I was seven."

The doctor gives me another look that tells me something is very wrong. Why wouldn't mum and dad stop me if it was wrong? "People bought my potions just as if they were mum's," I say defensively.

"My wife uses Skin Stim," the doctor says, fiddling with the clasp on his case. "Has for years."

He shakes his head and begins asking me question after question about my methods. I answer as completely as I can, knowing that everything makes him angrier. "I experimented on mice before I tried anything new," I tell him.

He lashes back, "Don't you know that a mouse is not like a magical person! That it's the magic in us that makes for a friend or foe for the wizard doctor?" My mouth drops open. How was I supposed to know that?

He calms down and tries to smile again. "Would you like to do what I do? Make potions, the right potions, to help people?"

I stare at him. No one has ever asked me what I wanted to do.

"How would you like to be around other children like you?" he pursues.

Of course. My face goes carefully blank. From everything I heard him say, I'm a monster and I belong in an asylum, so he's going to take me to some kind of reformatory. I nod dully. What point is there in resisting? My mouth is filled with an awful taste and I just want to be able to sleep forever.

The doctor goes back indoors and I follow him so that I can stuff my pockets with warding ingredients to protect me from the other inmates. I pack the change of clothes as instructed and place a few more items in the satchel that used to be my father's tool case. Vaguely, the man's voice reaches me from the closed parlor door again.

"Unnatural for a boy of his age to bear this kind of responsibility. What they have done to him may never be undone. To be abandoned with that lout of a muggle father and an ailing mother in this wreck of a house? Of all people, Adele Laurent should have suspected. She and the grandmother must have a lesser case, and thus some form of immunity, but she's a learned woman—she must have seen the boy was dirty and ill-fed! That he was gifted and needed formation! And instead she and the grandmother fill his head with nonsense. They didn't even trouble themselves to get him his own wand!"

This is very strange. I cudgel my brains but these hours around my mother's death were engraved in my memory—I've obsessed over them thousands of times. Yet something is different now. I didn't hear this conversation the first time! I was too busy rinsing my mouth out with Miracle Mead, my mother's sweet-tasting tonic, and coating my chest with Hell Boar Wax. If only I'd paid attention the first time I lived this! I would have understood I wasn't being carted off to my worst fears.

"How would you like to go be with other children like you?"

The doctor couldn't have known I assumed that meant a hospital where they sequester mother-killers like me.

The adults who would take charge of my life couldn't have understood that the threat of the asylum was my bread and butter since I had use of reason. That my father would threaten to send my mother there if I wasn't good, threaten to send me there so I could stop encouraging her, and the only thing, the huge thing that kept us from all-out war was the mutual terror we had of sending her to such a place.

"Have you done the washing-up-they'll-work-you-a-sight-harder-in-the-loony-farm."

Where did I learn about what happens to people sick like my mother? St. Mungo's, Erstwhile Pickerell, Aurora Rest, Boniface the Believer, the names crept into my mind before I knew what they referred to. What part of the mind is ready, reserved for nightmare in any child? Perhaps that's what the ghoulish fairy tales native to every culture are for—to fill this space. The only fairy stories I heard were my grandmother's violent morality tales and my mother's vague daydreams in my already lost childhood.

(Since then I have been to St. Mungo's and Aurora Rest and a few other places where the wizarding world hides its mistakes. My was heart thumping in my chest even then, even after I had faced worse things. The staff there are kindly, that much didn't match my imaginings, but they can't stop the infestations of Mantis Moths and other insects drawn to the madness, the hospital foundation sinking to one side without warning and the people getting lost in the bedsheets that weave themselves into moebius strips overnight. All these things happen with people who have opened the wrong door and then lost their way so they can't shut it. They are not pretty places and the sheer numbers of affected people do tend to attract unsavory life forms and chaos. Of course, I only sensed this as a boy, but it did some good for me when I found out that my childhood fears were partially justified.)

It is late by the time the doctor grabs hold of my hair and apparates us to the train station. Aunt Adele is there looking uglier than I have ever seen her. She's wearing some odd dress and coat instead of her usual robe. They walk me to the track area that leads to the secret platform, which I almost don't get to because I don't believe them that you have to walk through brick.

Again, I see something new in the memory this time. I can see that it's not so much that they are scared of me and want to get rid of me, which is what I accepted then without question.

The doctor is horrified by what I have gone through, and a little shaken by the precociousness of my campaign to help my mother. He wants to give me a real chance.

The formidable Aunt Adele is ashamed.


	4. Chapter 4

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 4: The Harrowing Fire

But I saw none of this then. All I knew was that my aunt was throwing me bodily against the brick wall. I land on the deserted secret waiting spot for the Hogwarts Express. A conductor is waiting for me—all I carry in my small satchel with a change of clothes is my mother's color-coded potions index, one of the disappearing labels from her potions jars, and the wedding picture I stole from my father, so they have no luggage to load. The train starts up as soon as I'm inside.

I'm allowed to ride up front in a special compartment with the conductor, which is an honor that would have distracted any other boy of ten. Me, I scarcely heard a word he said—I was so frightened of the other little murderers I would be living with.

When I later heard others' nostalgia about their first time at school, I couldn't believe it. It took me weeks to sort out that it was, in fact, a kind of school and that there was no reason to escape, though I tried it several times. That was one of the first things that marked me socially—why would anyone want to escape from paradise, from the treacle-tart fountains and the unending passages to explore?

Except there were too many things that set me apart, this student, a year younger than the others, who arrived just after the start of the new spring term, disturbing what they already knew what to expect from school.

This fierce boy who didn't understand what a "game" was, who blasted harmless paper dragonflies out of the air in class if they ventured too close to him, who had never learned the most basic cleaning spells but could recite the last words of Jacques de Molay. Who couldn't follow directions in potions class but was as likely to correct the teacher as to blow things up. Who couldn't do the simplest charms at some times, but other moments could make astonishing things happen with an unknown language rumbling from his gut. Who couldn't write without his parchment rolling up on him or interact properly with a house elf.

There were many reasons to mistrust me, but what was it specifically that the other children saw when they skirted me in the hallways? They must have seen long before I did. What I was. What I could have been. What I was going to be.

The aversion they quickly developed was for the scrawny boy they met four days after my arrival, the one with the pageboy haircut which was unfortunately much like a character in a wizarding comic popular at the time. Who wore the overly fine hand-me-down velvet robe with the lace collar and cuffs that was unfortunately waiting for me at the school, sent by my grandmother. This boy had little to do with the half-feral creature with knotty hair most of the way down his back who was levitated straight into the infirmary while muttering a mishmash of warding spells and clutching a knot of evergreen berrytree against curses.

It doesn't take long for the nurse to realize: everything covered by clothes was compromised by the fact that I bathed very seldom, but my hands and face—the parts my father and grandmother monitored—were a different color, a cleaner color. The woman set her mouth and without a word lifted me with her wand to dip me headfirst into various noxious potions to loosen the dirt and heal my skin.

Once I'm out of the baths it's apparent that I have an infestation of Packet Lice on my left arm. There is Scabrous Eddy all down my back. The nurse stalks off and I gather the bedclothes around me, fearing that they won't give me any clothes. I hear her angry voice saying something into the fireplace grate, and then in a few moments there is another angry voice, and both the nurse, and the other adult who seems to be a nurse or a doctor, are poking at me with instruments. They must be very annoyed that this charge has been visited upon them out of nowhere.

Then they're opening salves and ointments while arguing over my head. They seem surprised when I speak up. I insist on hearing all the ingredients of every potion before I will accept it into or onto my person. The nurse answers my questions while they apply the stinging solutions using long-handled spatulas.

They try to respect the instructions about my hair but half of it couldn't be saved. She makes a satisfied noise when she is the one who figures out the trick to making the shears cut through my hair—with the help of a Capillar Comb she is able to cut the resilient locks and reveal something resembling a boy of ten. This sharp little creature finally sleeps exhaustedly in the hospital cot.

I only sleep for a few minutes at a time because I have nightmares about the moths and then the realization that I'm in an asylum jolts me awake. The nurse watches me make strange movements with my hands for as long as I can until sink back into darkness.

Over the next few days there are several more doctors or nurses or some sort of people who are there staring at me when I open my eyes. I don't like the way they look at me and so I pretend to be asleep most of the time. Actually, I do sleep more than I would like: it feels as though the last ten years have worn me out, body and soul. But this is an asylum, after all, and I don't want to be the victim of either the doctors or the inmates, whose voices I can hear floating up from the courtyard at times. The idea of being thrown in with these whooping lunatics makes me tremble with dread.

On the morning of the fifth day my primitive attempts at warding have worn me out and I follow another adult to my first class because there's nothing more to be done about it. A kind of fog has settled on my mind and I begin to navigate within it. No color will be as bright again, I begin to understand; no person will ever be close enough for their features to be anything more than a blur. This is what killers are sentenced to. This is what my mother had been protecting me from. A loveless world.

My first few days of school pass by quickly because I'm searching the other children's faces for hints of the madness and violence that must lie beneath. Are they even more evil than me? They know so many spells that I don't, and this vulnerability forces me to try and absorb my lessons. When they play the first good-natured prank and make my quill tickle my nose I jump a mile from my seat and fling the writing instrument far from me, shaking. They stare, surprised, but the real teasing doesn't start until later, when my professors began trying to coax me out of my stony silence.

"Do you know the answer, Mr. Snape?" the potion mistress asks at the beginning of my first full week, trying to give me a chance to show off my superior knowledge, I'm sure. Of course I know the therapeutic properties of a Drowsing Worm!

"It's useful to cool potions that have begun to bubble too much or scorch the cauldron. The tail, especially, can be used to seal in the power of volatile ingredients that are inclined to evaporate too quickly. And mixed with the blood of a small animal like a rodent it can temporarily bind even very deep wounds until they can be tended to."

I could go on, but the professor and the students are gaping at me in a way that suggests that my knowledge is not appreciated. I slump into my seat and endure the whispers that follow me for the rest of the day, vowing not to speak again.

In Charms class, however, we are paired off and try as I might to keep my mouth shut, the sight of a small shower of sparks coming at me from another student's wand from the Borealis spell is too much.

"Borealis!" I shout back. The burst of light surprises everyone in the class, including the professor.

They take me to the Headmaster's office for the first time after class.

It's the first time I've seen this man, Dumbledore, who is the subject of much speculation among the other children. Familiar with the many kinds of punishment my aunt and my grandmother meted out, my heart races because I don't know what this man will do to me. He turns from where he has been looking out the window and smiles. "Chocolate frog?" he asks, levitating a dish towards me.

He sees my narrowed gaze and takes one himself. "I've a fondness for sweets, you see," he says, and points his wand to open cabinets and cupboards full of treats I've never even dreamed of. "I will give you your choice of sweetmeat if you will simply open your mouth and talk to me a little."

There are some jellied lemon crisps I had at a fair once with my grandmother. My mouth waters considering the canister. Fixing my eyes on the wizard's hands I nod. He asks me my impressions of the place and I say politely that it is very nice and clean, that the food is good and the lessons are not too hard, though I don't think the potions mistress is very smart.

He laughs and floats the jar of sweets to me. I take one and begin to put it in my pocket to save for later. "That was very helpful, Severus, so I think you can safely have one now and take one for later."

While the sticky candy occupies my mouth, the man takes off the ring he has been twisting around on his finger. "Have you ever seen one of these?" he asks.

I shake my head.

"When you spoke just now you think you said, 'Professor Cabinet is not very smart,' but what you actually said was something quite different. To me, without the ring, it would sound like—" and he makes some nonsensical sounds.

When I protest he holds up his hand. "Basque. You were speaking in Basque, mostly, though there were a few words the ring didn't translate for me, so I suspect you are slipping between languages even in the same sentence. You understand me perfectly well in English, don't you?"

I nod, trying to process what he is telling me. "Is this why everyone stares at me when I open my mouth?"

He holds up his hand, twists the ring, and says "Ancient Gaelic." He reflects for a moment. "Try speaking French, and tell me about your Aunt Adele, whom I know by reputation as an excellent linguist."

Self-conscious of my words, I tell him we used to have lessons about history of magic and other subjects, but that the only language I remember thinking about was French, because my grandmother would punish me if I didn't address her in that tongue.

"I can see why she would be invested in you speaking French with her, which you do flawlessly, by the way," the headmaster says in his own terrible French. "Your aunt seems to have played a practical joke on you. She imparted her ability to grasp the underlying sense behind any language, but she did so without making you aware that you ranged from perhaps a dozen or more different tongues over the course of a short conversation."

That insufferable hag! I'll teach her what I think of her the next time our paths cross! I think angrily.

The Headmaster moves to a drawer and takes out a smaller version of his ring. "This is called a Rosetta Ring. It will translate, with a short delay, the words others say to you, or what you say to them. I urge you not to become dependent on it, but to learn to speak for yourself as quickly as you can. It won't help you with writing, though from what I can see from your assignments you are only throwing the occasional French word in when you write, probably because you only know some words in one language and not the other. I will also give you the universal versions of your textbooks so that you can adjust them with a particular spell to whatever language works best for you on that day."

He slides a book across the table to me. "This book is a universal dictionary, so that you can connect the concepts you know in other languages to English. Speak the word and it will lead you to the correct English term. It seems you are also casting spells in other languages, which may explain why you get mixed results." He catches me scowling. "Your aunt has probably never had such a gifted pupil," the man says. "I'm sure she only wished for you to grasp the commonalities that all languages share."

I take the ring, the books and the sweetmeat and retire to a dark corner. Quickly I look up certain essential words and memorize them.

Bastard

Scoundrel

Rogue

Damn

Shit

Fuck

Hell

Liar

Simpleton

Oaf

Monster

Madman

Crazy

Murderer

Bitch

And I learn a phrase until it is perfect:

"If you come near me I'll hex you until you don't know your wand from your—"

A short list of possible endings to this utterance completes my first conscious foray into the English language.

What other armor does a schoolboy need besides a decent selection of profanity and an all-purpose threat?

Though for some reason, I've always cursed most naturally in French, just like my grandmother—still do, even to this day.

Once I began to locate the part of my brain that controlled switching between languages, my linguistic abilities allowed me to learn new vocabulary and other languages very quickly. It's a faculty that has stood me in good stead thousands of times in my life, but all I can feel for the woman who gave me this gift is hatred. And even then, it was ugly Adele who taught me to use the gift of hatred and all the injustices others visit upon you, boil it down into a potion to make you stronger until you can come out on top.

There were many, many unpleasant experiences for my little hatred alembic throughout my schooling at Hogwarts.

In Charms class a short time later we were learning how to cast something stupid. Maybe it wasn't stupid, but I couldn't concentrate. All I knew was that my school-supplied wand was stupid. I couldn't get used to looking at that ugly yellowish wood in my hand. It was the color of a filthy tooth and I hated touching it. My mother's wand was a rich dark brown, a tiny bit lighter than black, with a silvery cast to it, especially in action. Why couldn't they have left me just one thing from her? I put all of my anguish at losing her into the resentment that they buried the wand with her, in keeping with wizard custom. I'd have been almost glad of something to remind me of what I did to her with it. Better than forgetting…

"Mr. Snape?"

There were some titters along with the professor's gentle voice. Mentally I invoke one of the ancient forbears of magic in French as my grandmother used to: Hermès! When will they stop being so kind?

"Yes ma'am, I mean sir." More titters. All these classes and horribly kind voices run together.

"Will you cast a Ferrous Flame?" and I discern the man who is addressing me. Yes, the Charms teacher is Professor Kneele, of course, the one with the utterly forgettable face. My eyes slide over his strangely liquid features, trying to memorize them again. He's looking rather desperate.

"Of course, sir," I say, automatically confident because this is the fire we use for all our iron cookware at home (I have no home anymore, don't even think—). I point with that yellow thing distracting me out of the corner of my eye, trying not to move the way I was taught (which is any way I wanted). Everyone is so stiff here. I'm trying to wind up and not think about the unnaturally light and hollow-feeling wand, trying to move only my arm from the wrist down and say the words in English and it all seems to be going rather well. I see the magic forming at the end of the wand, the flame is collecting under the pot—

Ping!

"Blimey, he nearly fried Cyrus with that bolt!"

"You all right, Mr. Barrie?" The professor is there in a flash. The other students are talking excitedly and some just watch a flame smolder on the floor. After they recover from the surprise, the jeering starts.

"He acts like he knows everything, but he can't light the fire for tea!"

"My name is Ssssevewuss Sssnape and I sssmite you!" (This taunt is vocalized with some exaggerated Frenchified manner that is one of the first clues I have an accent in English).

"You better watch out flinging that wand about! You could kill someone with that!" cries an aggrieved little girl who seems to have a crush on Cyrus. The boy appears to be milking a little singe on his arm for all it's worth.

My jaw is working but I can't get a sound to come out. All the while I'm walking towards where those offensive words came from. I stand over where the little girl is kneeling next to Cyrus.

"What. Did. You. Say." I gnash each word separately.

"I said you better watch out you could—"

At some point I must have dropped the ugly wand, but I feel my magic rippling through my body. Far away I'm aware of everyone staring at me. I'm undulating. Probably if I had my wand out they would have reacted, but my behavior was so odd they didn't know what to expect.

The magic concentrates between my two hands—dominant, supporter, right, left. It moves back and forth, getting more powerful with every rotation. "Say it again," I say almost imploringly. She starts to stutter as if she can't help herself.

"Who told you?" I'm thundering now. "What did they say? I have a right to know!" For once the words seem to be coming out in perfect English.

I've raised her from a kneeling position and have her hovering slightly off the ground so that we're eye level, both with expressions of pure childlike wonder that someone would hurt us the way we felt the other child had.

"Finite incantatum!" the professor cries, and both the girl and I fall to the floor.

They keep her in the infirmary overnight, careful to keep her screened off from the little corner that I have made my home. I feel exhausted and feverish, and then when that abates, worrying about the punishment I'm sure to receive is even worse.

Dumbledore is traveling at the time, but underneath my breakfast plate the next morning I find a note. "Point one: No one was going to know anything about the accident related to your mother's death, unless you told them. Which you seem to have done rather effectively. I trust you can also clear up possible misunderstandings on any essential points. Point two: Wandless magic is a very great gift, and one you must earn the privilege to use. Henceforth at Hogwarts you will use a wand, but we will endeavor to find one that isn't the color of a Beetlebore's earwax."

I smile despite myself and then look up to an entire school's worth of eyes staring back as if I was calmly eating a human heart for breakfast. Only a murderer would be smiling after nearly making someone die of a—scratch—.

I finish my toast, which turns into sand in my mouth. This stupid minor accident in class, and everyone's reaction to it, is yet another thing that makes no sense at all yet is somehow reflective of a fault in my character. I push my plate a little too forcefully away as I stand up. A couple of girls flinch when they hear the sound of the porcelain chinking against the cutlery.

Might as well make good use of their ignorance and go for the grand exit.

I never did clear up for the student body what really happened to my mother, partly because no one had troubled to clear it up for me. The idea that I might be dangerous keeps the pranks and taunts at a safe distance, and I really don't expect more from life than that.

My mother now appears in my mind as she looked when she had all her faculties, and if I miss this woman, I have learned to live with her absence over a period of years. The luxury of having people do things for me, as the clockwork made up of professors and house elves and caretakers does, makes me want to repay the kindness with careful study. Thus, I try to master my melancholy as much as possible and throw myself into making up what I missed first term.

If there's one thing I can't stand about my new life at school, though, it's that my potions don't turn out. The simplest things I could do when I was four or five—poaching salamander eggs, making a decoction of pennypine leaf—they boil over, they smoke, they burst into flame. It's as though they're mocking me with my misuse of potions for my mother, with my folly at thinking I knew what I was doing when I was medicating her. But I do know one thing, and it's that the boiling point for Ineffable Yew is reached after hours, not minutes!

The potions instructor, Professor Cabinet, is always nearby to sidle up to me, and suddenly my potions are brought back to a neutral state. Then she moves away with the strangest apologetic simper, but the other students notice very well.

"Thought you knew all about potions," someone whispers and the others laugh. This is my punishment for what I did to her, I think, and try to focus on what the professor is saying. All I can think about is my hands just knowing what they know about the different ingredients, aching with what they learned from my dear, mute mother's hands. You can just feel what goes in next, can't you, why all this tiresome measuring?

My potion starts making these popping explosions that sound vaguely obscene. They all laugh and Professor Cabinet is there again beside me. This time I see just a glimpse of something shiny in the cuff of her robe.

Before she can hide it my hand-magic has her immobilized. "What is that?" I hiss. I think she must have been sabotaging my potions all this time.

"It's nothing," she says with a desperate smile, "Just neutralizing it, er, ah, a little."

I let her go and she seems thoroughly shaken up, as do some of the students near me. They simply can't handle the wandless magic thing—they've just begun to understand what they can do with a wand. Yet ironically my power is so fragmented at that confusing time of my life that probably it's the surprise at my unusual technique making them let down their guard that does half the work.

On my way out of dinner I am called into the headmaster's office.

"So, Severus, I trust you are liking it here all right," Dumbledore says in that way that makes you want to be complicit no matter what you feel.

"Yes, I suppose so, sir, thank you," I mumble. "What's Cimarron Nonesuch Salt?"

His eyebrows shoot up and he looks very pleased, as if I've given him a present when I just desperately want my potions to stop blowing up. He laughs and waits for me to explain. "I caught a glimpse of some reddish brown powder in the phial Professor Cabinet was hiding from me and I looked up potion neutralizing agents," I say flatly, not wishing to play at being the prize pupil. "There's more going on here, sir, I know it, and I'm not going to leave until I find out."

His smile fades into a ghostly kindness around his lips that makes me itch. "Yes, well, Professor Cabinet was only trying to help—"

"—why do I need it when no one else does?"

"—But should have erred on the side of explaining more—"

"—And I never had this problem before—"

"—Rather than less—"

"I know how to boil moss!"

We end up looking at each other, both realizing we're skirting around the same thing.

"It's about my mum, isn't it?" I say, slumping back in the chair.

"Yes, as a matter of fact," he replies, and I look at him sharply, expecting him to lie to me.

"Tell me what you think," he prompts. I speak more than I have in the two months since I've been there about my suspicions that my mother's madness was contracted in some way I can't identify and that it was as much something to do with her magic as her mind. I skirt around some of my worst concerns about actually killing her—all in childish terms, of course, but the concepts come out clearly.

"Remarkable," he says, and he runs a hand over my head, tousling my hair a little. I stiffen but don't flinch. "To think that a child could do so much on his own. We can make something great of you, young Severus, but you have to trust me." I give him a sour look. "And that begins with you believing me about one thing—you did nothing worthy of blame."

I'm staring at him now. Maybe others like the doctor had said something similar before but this is different. I'm hearing him. From a distance, but hearing him, and it's like his voice is worming under my skin. I don't like it, but I don't want it to stop. "You are a very bright, no, a brilliant boy, who has grown up with none of the advantages of a proper home. Ah ah," he staves off my objection, "Though with every benefit of a mother's love."

"Then why can't I make a simple Moonweed Milk," I say quietly. "It must have been my mom's ability I was just leeching off and I can't really do potions."

He bursts out in surprised laughter that makes me jump in my chair. "My dear boy, you have more natural ability for potions than the rest of the school put together," he says. "And the equivalent of an apprenticeship with an adept, as I believe your mother must have been."

"Laurent's unguents and somnolents, known in Britain and the continent," I whisper, hearing her voice singing a jingle she'd taught me when I was very small. "She studied at the Invisible School."

"Since your knowledge always surprises me, how much do you know about the Marbling principle, first articulated by Merlin himself?"

I shake my head. "Nothing, sir."

"Well, in a nutshell, it means that life changes us, and this is reflected in our magic."

"So whatever I experience means my recipes have to change? How does anyone standardize anything at all?"

He chuckles and then leaves off. "I mean life, life itself changes us."

I feel sick. "By life you mean death," I say bluntly.

"You were there when a tremendously powerful witch breathed her last, and it changed your magical signature. Perhaps permanently."

"Because I killed her."

"Because you were there and you loved her," he says sternly. "Now I will tell Professor Cabinet that you will be administering your own Cimarron salt to your potions, and that she can arrange one afternoon a week for you to experiment on your own until you get the right proportions. Agreed?"

I nod, my thoughts racing too fast to even say thank you.

"And Severus?" I look back. "A student can incur harsh penalties for raising a wand to a teacher—" I open my mouth— "or the equivalent. Good night."

If that was all, a mere change in my magic, Professor Cabinet wouldn't have looked at me the way she did when she administered the salt.

The Harrowing FIre, which, untreated, leads to the Reaper's RewardLater on in the library I find several references to the phenomenon Dumbledore is talking about, what they call the Harrowing Fire, or Reaper's Reward.

It's all in the context of killers. Apparently potion masters are not usually made of such strong stuff, so most of the unexpected magical effects mentioned are about an inability to cast with a tried and tested wand that tends to smolder in the hand, or someone gifted at transfigurations getting stuck between forms, or something like that.

The principle is easy to apply to potions: the Cimarron salt's power comes from its neutral magical state. Keeping some in your wand-pocket or rubbing some directly on the skin of the area that's transfigured improperly can help.

"He who is stained by blood he did let, will find rest from the red he doth et," one of the older quotations says obscurely.

"What you reading?" a girl with blond sausage curls pops up out of nowhere and asks with a smile. I stare at her dumbly. Has she been watching me read about my mother's blood staining my murderous hands?

"About the consequences of violence," I snap, closing the book with a bang as she scurries off.

It only takes two after-class periods to work out the right use for the salt—well, three, after the first one in which I spent the time staring down Professor Cabinet until she (with obvious relief) agreed to wait in the adjoining room while I experimented. Two scruples of the salt when dealing with warm compounds, one dram when dealing with cool mixtures. Something in between for the more stable mixtures.

And for the professors—who all look at me with the same look, more or less disguised—who see blood on my hands every time I cast the simplest spell?

No known remedy.

I forgot to ask Dumbledore if he knew what was wrong with my mother.


	5. Chapter 5

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 5: An Opening

"Don't you want to sleep in the dormitory with the other children, make friends?" Madam Lessmore asks as I settle in the infirmary bed with a book to read by the light of my wand. The Wizard Whist cards are beside me in case the nurse has a moment to spare for a game. It makes me feel to guilty to think on it, but I've come to enjoy every moment I spend alone with Madam, as I call her. I like the way she rebukes me for not combing my hair, or the way she presses her lips together when I tell her about all the things I'm learning, sparing no question or criticism. I don't want to like it at this school, I don't want to think of showing her my high marks on an essay, but that's what I have begun to do.

The middle-aged woman has honey-colored skin and dark hair pulled tightly into a bun, but the strands that escape have a definite curl. Her features seem to reflect a mix between African ancestry and some non-English European background I can't quite identify, but her voice is pure Yorkshire. Her wide-set eyes are an impersonal dark brown, almost black, that occasionally bear a hint of warmth. She's the sort of person who seems like she came into this world in uniform, and also seems quite comfortable with being able to move within that generic garment quickly, efficiently, with no apparent antecedents or cares.

I like that she doesn't try to distract me from my worries or strike any false notes with me at all. Just being near her while her hands go about the work of setting broken bones and healing hexes gone awry makes me feel like she's ordering the world along with the impeccably smooth sheets.

When I think of Nurse Lessmore giving me biscuits and a calming potion in bed when I wake up from a nightmare, I have to push my mother's face from my mind so I don't hurt her memory.

This suggestion of a dormitory just makes me stare at her. I have a dormitory, here with her. "You aren't meant to stay here forever," she says and my face goes carefully blank.

Of course I'm not meant to stay there. I've made the fundamental error no unnatural creature should ever make: I've allowed myself to be slightly comfortable. "What would you like me to do," I say quietly.

She looks frightened. "Well, you have to choose a house."

"Fine then," I respond, looking down at my book but only seeing my stupidity for letting down my guard with this woman.

The next day we have a private sorting ceremony, just Dumbledore, Madam Lessmore and me. This hat starts blathering on and all I can think of is that I was a fool to believe the nurse really wanted me there. "Don't make that mistake again," I'm repeating to myself angrily. The thing goes on and on. They're all arguing about something but my mouth is coated with something terrible and I just want to lay down anywhere and forget that I have no home, that I'm at the mercy of others' decisions in this institution.

"Is that all right with you, Severus?" Dumbledore asks.

"Fine, yes, fine," I say, feeling like I'm going to faint with exhaustion. They're putting me with the other inmates and their murders are going to seep into my dreams. I'd never been a particularly gifted dreamer but suddenly I'm terrified at having to share unconsciousness with all these strangers. Yet I'm so anxious to lie down and sleep.

They lead me to a huge dormitory filled with boys who look at me curiously. Introductions are made. I nod, eyes scanning for the empty bed. Finally they lead me over to a lower bunk and I curl up in the sheets with my robes on. They're still talking. Hermès, shut up!

I wake up in the early morning and note with little interest that the tapestries in the room are green. Which house is that? Oh right, the one with the snake like the way they say my name. Slytherin. Perfect.

Mechanically I get ready with this barracks full of boys who nudge each other but say nothing.

Nothing until the second or third night.

"So you were placed with us," a chubby boy with curly brown hair says while we're brushing our teeth.

"Looks like it," I say, trying to fight against the accent I'm now excruciatingly self-conscious of, which makes the vowels roll away from me.

He gives me a look that is appraising without being insulting. "We were hoping they would," he says, the toothpaste adding a rabid touch to his words.

I swallow my toothpaste. "Why?"

"Don't you know about us?" he inquires, as if he were part of a crime syndicate instead of a warehouse full of boys. The ones with the affected manner, I recall. "We're Slytherin!"

My eyes cut to the wall-hanging that says as much.

"We know things," he begins to sputter out. "Things that the professors don't."

"Such as," I spit into the basin.

He looks around with exaggerated care. "Like did you know that you can make someone punch themselves in the nose and do all kinds of things to themselves, and they won't be able to stop?"

Yes, like I seem to have let myself get involved in this inane conversation that I can't seem to get out of, I think. "Oh yes?" I ask in a bored tone and begin edging away.

"And you can make someone disappear," I open my mouth to scoff, "and never reappear, ever?" I close my mouth.

"Why would you want to do that?" I ask.

"Well, if you had a body, or something," he mumbles, embarrassed for some reason.

Oh, I get it.

"Well, the next time I do have a bothersome corpse to dispose of, I'll let you know," I drawl, and return to my bed to hide behind my charms book, which seems to make the most sense to me in Galician tonight.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that I ended up in the one house where my reputation as a murderer is an asset. But Severus Snape's emotional range doesn't reach to either end of the spectrum, so I duly memorize the spell for taking the wrinkles out of robes.

The term ends very suddenly. I've been so successful at NOT thinking about my mum, not thinking about Aunt Adele or grand-mère, (my father I don't have to try not thinking about; I was skilled at not thinking about him while we lived together) that I wasn't thinking about what I would do during the summer. My marks are good on all my exams except transfiguration, a weakness that provides much pleasure for my fellow students.

Some of the brainier students are not pleased that I did as well as or better than everyone else who has had a full year in some subjects. For potions I lose points because I refuse to use the tiresome calibration methods Cabinet insists that her students employ. My levitation lotion has me shoot up so fast I almost hit my head on the ceiling, however, while everyone else's gives them a couple inches off the floor at best.

At the last evening meal the moment I've been not-thinking about is so close I can taste it—a black flavor on the root of my tongue. The time has come to go back to Bittenbrook, to see my relatives who will never forgive me for my mother's death, to be the murderer people here have almost forgotten I am. I don't want to see the house, most of all. No matter if it's crumbled on its foundations or is preserved exactly as it was the awful day I left it, I never want to see that house again. Or Aunt Adele and her palsy, for that matter.

Only one small thing comforts me. I've learned a few things that will give cousin Veronica some pause, I think without relish.

People are eating their fill of puddings and there is butterbeer, and for the first time in a long time I see Dumbledore looking at me. I look back. Slowly he gets to his feet and gives some rubbish of a speech. I don't listen. I think about where they buried my mum (they never told me, and I never wanted to seem so ghoulish as to ask) and wonder if I could find it by calling the wand they buried with her (my wand, too).

I flex my hands unconsciously under the table and wonder if they'll let me have any sort of wand in Bittenbrook, whoever takes charge of me. They probably will fear for their lives. Maybe they'll let me sleep in a stable or something.

I suddenly want to be alone more than anything in the world. I look miserably at the sea of eager faces around me and wish them all away, but not at the expense of having to go back to my home village.

That night I can't bear the images of my mother's death. Everything that I've been avoiding has come crashing down on me and all I know is I can't go back to that place.

I leave the dormitory without dissembling—let me get detention, anything to keep me here!—and go out into the hallway. My mind is making and discarding potions that could make me contagious and thus land me in quarantine, that could give me a hideous but temporary case of scales, turn my arms into wings that will allow me to avoid any attempts to herd me onto that ridiculous locomotive. Ways to make myself invisible so they can't find me in a forgotten corner of the school.

The last one is the best idea, but I have this horror of invisibility after my upbringing as a mostly ignored child. What if I lose myself? It's irrational, but I can't bear it. So I become truly deranged at some point on the way to the potions chamber to make this compound that will save me from Bittenbrook. Instead, I throw myself down the stairs thinking a broken bone or two will do the trick.

It's odd—I can't seem to get more than a slight bruise going down the stairs. It's like my body flows down them like water. Puzzled, I throw myself down again.

"There you are," Madam Lessmore says from where she's appeared at the bottom of the stairs, not commenting on my rumpled appearance. "Dumbledore is expecting us."

We walk to the headmaster together. I'm physically and mentally drained from all those tumbles down the stairs and trying to figure out why I couldn't do worse than a slight bruise to myself. She says "gingersnap" and we are let in to Dumbledore's chambers.

"Severus, still in one piece, I see?" Dumbledore twinkles at me and I give him my best stony stare. "All you had to do is ask," he says reproachfully.

I look to Madam Lessmore and see my childlike hope reflected on her face for a moment before I clamp down on it. "Ask someone to break my leg? I didn't know you were so willing to help, but here you are," I stick my pajama-clad leg out of my robe.

"What do you want to do over summer break—assuming you want to join us again in the fall?" Dumbledore inquires. Why does he always make me talk?

"Yes, sir, I would very much like to return. I like learning things." I give a beseeching look to the nurse. How much more of this is there? Can I really avoid going home?

"It had to be your decision, of course. Your family is expecting you." A wave of nausea comes over me. "But it just so happens there is an opening somewhere else."

"An opening? What opening?" I demand. "Is it a reformatory? I won't go to an asylum."

Madam Lessmore looks wounded. "I have a distant relative. In Romania. He needs a shepherd."

"A shepherd?" Dumbledore cocks his head at me and I am aware this is some sort of experiment but I don't care. A strange sensation is boiling in my chest, despite my best efforts to master it. "You don't mean it."

They have no way of knowing that this is one of the games my mother and I used to play. Indoors, of course, in the basement near the magical river, but I would pretend to be a shepherd and she would float things my way to be tended like a flock. All the fresh air my life has lacked comes rushing at me with just the word.

"Do I get to sleep outside? What sort of sheep are they? Will I get to carry a bow and arrow to protect them from predators?" The questions come out in a rush and they don't stop until I realize they're both looking at me in amazement. It appears I have very strong feelings about this scheme. "I'm sorry, sir, Madam Lessmore. I love getting outside."

"And we like to see you happy," says the nurse softly. I throw my arms around her and she stiffens but strokes my hair a couple times before I sit back in the chair, unable to follow the plans they're making because I can only wonder what Romania will be like.

The next day I travel by portkey to a remote area of Romania. Before I leave Nurse Lessmore hands me a small package. "From me and Miss Bundle. Have a good summer, Severus."

Her distant relative, Vin, is either a very wise Muggle or a very wise Wizard, I can't tell. He grunts in some obscure dialect that I pick up by the end of the first day, to his surprise. But it doesn't matter because we spend a lot of the time in silence, looking at the sky for the many hints of weather to come, or digging up grubs to use in a surprisingly tasty soup.

It takes me a day or two to remember my package, and when I restore it to normal size with some difficulty it proves to be two muggle books.

"My favorite when I was your age," says the inscription on the first one, Robinson Crusoe, signed with Madam Lessmore's neat script. The second is Oliver Twist. "Always remember there's more where that came from," this one says in a disorderly hand, and is signed by Miss Bundle, the librarian who sees a lot of me. They are both appropriately dark and desperate, and the enjoyment I get out of these books I wouldn't be caught dead with at school is the beginning of my muggle education sponsored by the nurse and the librarian for the next several summers. Soon the books would range to muggle history and science, but that summer I gorged my imagination on these delicacies and fell in love with the fiction our world does so poorly.

When I finish these books I send them back by owl post and receive more. But mostly I am busy falling in love with the Romanian countryside. Vin and I tend the flock together sometimes and take turns hunting or gathering some of the rare butterflies, mushrooms and herbs he sells at the rural markets. We get rained on and once there is hail. I feel a visceral hate towards the wolf that takes down one of our sheep and Vin has to hold me back by the collar so I don't chase after it. He teaches me songs in his dialect and he appreciates the light I can make with my hands to illuminate the moonless nights.

In all, I spend the summer mostly without conversation, have learned hundreds of new species and collected many for experimentation when I have access to a lab. I haven't worn a robe for three months and my feet are toughened from walking barefoot.

They are the three happiest months of my life to date.

I don't want to go back to school, but Vin threatens to cut my now-matted hair and I know I must go back. I can't wait to tell Madam Lessmore about everything. A portkey arrives by owl and I look once at my master, full of gratitude for this wonderful summer of being treated like a normal boy. He nods and lays a hand on my head, gives me a Gypsy blessing and yanks on my ponytail once before the portkey spins me away.

My bare feet land in the field near Hogsmeade. I walk through the village and then towards Hogwarts, infinitely stronger than I left. The stone castle recognizes me and I it—it's a fuzzy kind of familiar feeling that descends upon me.

I am not really home until I'm in the infirmary and hear a squawk. Then Madam Lessmore is pointing at my filthy, hoof-like feet. My pants and blouse are tattered and equally dirty, and then her eyes get to my face.

"You look good, Severus," she admits. "Vin grew quite fond of you. At least that's what I think he said. Maybe you can translate his letter for me. He could have been telling me to put the Flea Flush on the boil." She clucks at me. "Your family sent some clothes," she adds in a tone as if she has more she could say about my family.

I look at the frankly unsuitable dress robes that are 30 years out of date and no doubt too short and I grin, to her surprise. "Don't burn my clothes before I clean out my pockets," I instruct her. The tiny packages from Hogsmeade are deposited on the bed and she helps me get them back to the right size again. I earned enough this summer for clothes to last me through the year. Never again would I be dependent on someone else for clothing, I had resolved at some point.

The nurse is charming the wrinkles out and folding everything neatly while I have three different baths behind the screen. I come out wrapped in a robe and she has my clothes all ready for me. "Sensible choices," she says approvingly. "If a bit serious." I put on the dark shirt with a conspicuous lack of lace cuffs and feel almost as happy as wandering around in the fields of Romania with Vin.

Source

She helps me untangle my hair and I insist upon dressing it in a series of braids the way I saw Gypsy men wearing their hair in Romania. I contemplate my reflection and it could be the paler prototype of one of those olive-skinned men I saw sitting around on wooden crates in every marketplace Vin and I passed when we went through towns: silently drinking tea or spirits out of a glass, there is none of the boisterous laughter or posturing I associate with men drinking in a British pub. Their long hair twisted in braids that conceal a tiny weapon and the embroidered waistcoat that stores several daggers would cause much sport should they walk into a public house here—until every man's tongue was cut out before he knew what hit him.

I realize vaguely how much something in me had been calmed to learn that there were more species of men than the very narrow cross-section surrounding me in my limited life. Lessmore's eyes meet mine in the mirror, and I see her awareness range from the almost-eleven-year-old boy wearing his first decent suit of clothes, to some older me, the way I sometimes see myself shift in her eyes.

"Have a good year, Severus," she says. "I'll see that the rest of your wardrobe makes it down to Slytherin house."

Walking very straight so the now-unfamiliar robes don't trip up my feet screaming to get out of my shoes and back to their free state, I make my way down to the welcoming dinner.

The catcall shakes my new calm. "Nice hairdo!" The sentiment is echoed all over the Great Hall. I automatically reach for a dagger and then realize I didn't bring the full outfit from Romania.

"Hey Snape, how was your summer!" calls someone from Ravenclaw. That Babel of people I've been blessedly free of all summer hits me like a gale force wind. All of their magics are battering against my awareness so that I can't think of an appropriate retort. Slytherin House merely contents themselves with a shared sly grimace, bless them.

"It was all right," I finally manage and am about to politely ask about theirs.

Then the boy asks me, "Did you drink a lot of tea with grandmama?" He mangles something like a French accent.

This again. Haven't they noticed I look brown and strong from carrying lambs on my shoulders?

"Yes, that's exactly what I did," I agree tiredly. My summer is something sacred to me, and all the stupid versions of it that get bandied about at the dinner table cannot touch it.

All in all, it was a fairly benign beginning to a year that was more of the same.


	6. Chapter 6

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 6: The Change

Things went on very much the same for a long time.

My friend is Nurse Lessmore. It doesn't matter that my classmates move in a different orbit than mine. That the younger classes are dared to pluck a hair from my head as part of a hazing ritual. Needless to say they are too terrified to get that close. I have learned to shield so well that they could be turned away from my path with a mere thought to this almost visible callous I build up year after year.

I don't need their childish concerns. I divide my time between the infirmary and the library. The nurse doesn't actually live in the school full-time, so when she is at her dwelling in Hogsmeade or looking in on an elderly patient there, the librarian is my less-warm adult guide to the world of magic. The dry wisp of an old woman named Miss Bundle gives me free reign of the stacks, and this is all the freedom my curious mind needs.

The Change shatters this stasis in ways that are worse than my books could possibly prepare me for.

Since I am as much as a year younger than the students in my cohort, I've had extra time to prepare. At the first signs the plan is to start taking the Bugbear's Backwards Bloom that I've been stockpiling from my ostensibly social visits to Madam Lessmore.

Well, they are the only socializing I do, but when I walk away, careful not to clink, my robe is always full of whatever I need for my own personal potion use, or the occasional potion someone commissions in my lucrative side business. Usually it is something to make the student sick enough to get them out of a test, something I don't need a potion for—I could just give them water and pass a hand over it. I don't want that useful ability becoming public knowledge, so I give them something appropriately bilious looking. Occasionally they want something to impress a student they're sweet on, a chance to leave no trace so they can sneak into another house, that sort of thing.

Lessmore must have known her raw ingredients were disappearing, looking back. I take care to never steal anything dangerous, and she must have seen that and decided to say nothing.

The ingredients in the Backwards Bloom could be dangerous in the long term, but if prolonged use gives me spots or turns my teeth green, so much the better.

I have no intention of falling in love.

Even falling in like or lust is not part of the program. For someone who had only observed my parent's relationship, I have an understandable resolve to never let such an injustice destroy me.

Or to find out that no one could ever love me. Another thing my upbringing had driven home.

So I watch the evidence of puberty dividing the boys even further from the girls and then from each other, and am tricked into a false security when nothing happens to me for a long time. Nevertheless, I keep growing like a rangy plant towards a light source it senses far-off, and am rather smug about it.

Until that night that catches me unawares.

I've only had a few vague but exciting dreams, but I never woke up with an embarrassing spot on my pajamas like the other boys, proof that I am still safely a child. I had long since stopped having nightmares about killing my mother, and I am ashamed for feeling so relieved to not see her face anymore when I close my eyes.

Dreaming is a mechanical affair—the usual classmates and professors and potions. Occasionally I dream I am by the sea with my grandmother, just her and me and the almost painful kinship with the salty liquid boiling with life and secrets that makes me want to fling myself in no matter how cold it is. Sometimes grand-mère is humming and I know that she is talking to sea creatures. In one dream an octopus flings itself out of the surf and heaves of its own volition into her cauldron resting by our feet. I'm sure it's not my mother—her I always recognize no matter what form she shows up in because she makes me feel warm all over. But the sea-dreams are always the most refreshing.

So I have no sense of danger when I go to sleep this night, not knowing that an erotic dream about my aunt awaits me.

Aunt Adele is all twisted up in some sheets that seem to ripple on their own accord, her black hair undone from the tight knot it usually rests in. Her sharp nose is marring the strangely peaceful look that the rest of her face wears. She is writhing around with her nightdress flowing into the sheets, and I think that it is as if her whole body has a palsy, not just her left hand.

I watch with curiosity at first, until I realize that there is no nightdress. She is naked within that maze of bedclothes. I want to run but I'm rooted to the spot. Her voice comes, and now that I know about her Gift I can recognize some of the languages—Basque, Gaelic, Ancient Greek, Tuscan, Mandarin, Persian—at the same time that my brain automatically understands them. In my dream I want to open my mouth and yell at her for the trick she played on me, but as soon as I open my mouth she starts moaning. It's a shared moan that comes out of both of our throats at once.

It is the most erotic sound I have ever heard and I want to vomit, but when I try to, my throat doesn't produce bile, it produces more of that sound.

AAAAaaaaa-Ohhhh-oooo-eheheh

I can't describe it. I will never be able to describe it, no matter how many times I try to pin down that sound that marks the end of my boyhood and the beginning of a complicated manhood.

If you had asked the dream-me at that moment whether I understood that this one dream would determine much of my life, he would have probably believed you. The atmosphere around me is thick with something. Flattened against some unseen wall in the dream, I still know I am watching my hated Aunt Adele. The spinster, the one with the mannish, palsied hands. The one with no use for little boys. But what I am seeing is something else entirely.

I am seeing everything I have ever wanted or could possibly want. I see my mother with her face unmarred by madness. I see my father actually look at me instead of right through me. I see Adele herself tousling my hair in an affectionate way after I got an answer right, instead of looking at me coldly, but it isn't just seeing—her terrifying hands are in my hair and I am seeing these things from within the darkness of our joined mouths and tasting them from our gasping breaths.

My joyless existence is too hungry for pleasure and proves itself stronger than my legs that try to kick hers away in revulsion.

With a conflicted shudder, I surrender into some pulsing chamber that answers every question I had never thought to ask.

When I wake up I am sticky with something I think is ejaculate but turns out to be vomit.

Welcome to puberty, Severus Snape.

It is more disgusting than I could have imagined.

With my Aunt Adele!

Another volley of heaves has me up out of the bed and racing to the toilets in the silent early morning. The cool tile feels like a heaven I don't merit.

I resolve to not dream again until I'm thirty. That seems like a nice, safe number.

That first early morning Madam Lessmore finds me feverish and dry-heaving on the floor outside her infirmary, and agrees to my request for Dreamless Sleep for the following night.

By mixing her standard concoction with an extract of Bitter Sawdust Melon that I had hit upon when I was eight and happens to be used all around Hogwarts as a way to keep out the many drafts in the old castle, it is made exponentially stronger, so I am able to take just a sip and funnel the rest into a phial in my sleeve. In this way I can make one dose last a week, but even so, she doesn't like giving that many doses to a growing boy.

"You'll stunt your growth," she warns, but at that age I already tower like a scarecrow over most of my older peers. "Everyone has to dream sometimes, Severus," she says.

Not if I can help it. "I'll brew it myself. You know I will."

She gives me a placebo colored like Dreamless Sleep. It feels all wrong in my hand. "Is this an 'Ask me not?'" I ask incredulously, having always thought that this potion designed to make someone less curious was only a myth.

She looks ashamed and then interested. "How did you know?"

I look at her crossly, annoyed that she would want a lesson in Spagyrics at a time when my sanity is on the line.

"How would I know if I were going mad?" I say suddenly.

Her surprise is replaced by That Look, that look that I hate getting from grownups. I pull at my itchy collar while she comes up with something appropriately neutral to say.

"It's natural for you to have questions, Severus," she begins, and I wonder again why she always uses my first name, as Dumbledore does, when the rest of the school never takes such a liberty. Is it because we can converse as equals about potions, or because she still remembers delousing the thin little feral creature I was at ten? Either way, I have no need for childish endearments.

"Oh I have a lot of questions," I snap, but the ready gibe suddenly gives way to feeling the nausea at all of them being answered in that pulsing space. It is curiosity that will be my undoing and lead me back there, to some part of Aunt Adele's anatomy I don't want to locate. I refuse to be interested! "But there are doors that shouldn't be opened," I say in a brutal voice.

I have discovered in my life that sometimes misery is the best compass. The tears quiver at my eyelids and course down my cheeks, no longer those of a child. I sit there and weep for all of the new sorrows that are sure to await me as I grow older, the cursed child, the one who still has to put Cimarron Salt on his wand because he has the Reaper's Reward.

She gives me Dreamless Sleep with the agreement that I will show her my recipe.

I don't dream for over a month, but a persistent bad taste grows at the back of my throat.

I find out the hard way that it isn't a side effect, but the taste of swallowed fate.

Avoiding dreams comes at a price after all.

Dumbledore leaves me a note, though he's sitting at the head of the table at breakfast as always and could call me to his office as he hasn't for years. I'm to be sent for extra lessons in Transfiguration. I'd rather muck out the hippogriff's pen than spend five minutes in the company of that smarmy Professor Eccles, but there it is, the headmaster wishes it, so it is so. I don't think she likes much giving up her Tuesday and Thursday evenings to pound transfiguration into my thick skull, but she is annoyingly game for the challenge.

I sit miserably in the Transfiguration classroom and stare at my jailer who is keeping me from the library or my own experimentation. What I'm supposed to understand in these exercises is unclear. The magic that has been coursing stronger in my body since having the dream about my aunt is making me excruciatingly aware of my posture—the power of a stance, of a hand gesture, to deflect attention or bring me into closer communion with the stone walls of the castle or sense a whisper of rain from very far off.

What I'm learning to do with my body helps me in some of my classes, but not in transfiguration, where the idea is to be another body entirely. I don't know how to leave behind all the knots and worries that make up my life until now. Usually I end up looking like myself with patchy fur or scales and have to go to the infirmary.

"Imagine yourself light as a feather, floating, floating…" Eccles urges.

At the end of the exercise I'm supposed to become a sparrow. Which I do—a stiff-backed, crooked-winged flightless excuse for a sparrow with a croak more like a crow's.

"Try a crow then," she says brightly.

That goes a bit better. I don't fly but I manage to swoop from the desk to the floor, though I land badly and twist my ankle a bit.

"Perhaps flying is a bit advanced. Try something easy. What's your favorite animal?"

To her dismay I become a spider (like the ones that used to lead me to potion ingredients in the rafters and remind me of the games I would play with my mother) with legs stuck all the wrong way around. Then I can't turn back to my human form properly and I have to go to Madam Lessmore again to get rid of the extra eyes and limbs. At least she's never so bloody cheerful.

"We'll keep trying!" Eccles leaves me at the nurse's office with barely hidden sadism in her voice, I think.

And without doubt, he that is so quick sighted in this my Mirror, that by his own industry he can find out the true matter, he does full well know upon what body the medicine is to be projected to bring it to perfection.

The Mirror of Alchemy, composed by the famous Friar, Roger Bacon, sometime fellow of Martin College and Brasen-nase College in Oxenforde.

The morning of my 33rd day without dreams sees me waking somewhat earlier than the other boys, and when I walk into the toilets I encounter my reflection:

I have become Aunt Adele.

I drop my toothbrush—it's a curse! Who's done this to me? How would they know what she looked like? Her mouth twists at me while I run my hands over my face. What is my face supposed to feel like? I look in every reflective surface, thinking someone has pranked the mirrors in my dormitory to make reflections into Boggarts, because nothing could be worse than being confronted with this hag's face first thing in the morning.

Madame Lessmore finds me wide-eyed and silent, sitting outside the infirmary. She won't let me stay, but all I wanted to do was check her reaction—she sees nothing amiss in my face.

I go down to the dorm to change after everyone's at breakfast and make it to the table at the last few minutes. No one looks up. Or those that do give me about as much regard as a teacup. This comforts me at first. Maybe it's only my reflection?

In class, I feel unsure for the first time, watching the other students.

The banter that always excluded me has gradually taken on a new edge. Children are their own world. Little despots, they need so little. Adolescents need. They fail, they posture. No child is truly ugly, but a teenager…

Maybe I have always been odd-looking, but at some point I have crossed over into the realm of hideous. I am an abomination, and this is why I am utterly alone. This must have been going on so long that when the professors call upon me in class, I barely rouse any attention. Isn't this what I've longed for—to be invisible?

There's a ferocious gale whipping the castle, so we have to stay inside rather than traipse about the grounds learning about magical creatures. Normally I would be secretly disappointed. I still feel like I've spent most of my life inside—because I have, if you count the magical river from my house as inside. My recent summers have been spent working for a potions firm that needs someone to collect rare specimens in the remote regions of Ireland and Scotland. Lessmore has convinced them I suffer from a rare ailment that makes me look far younger than my years.

Other than that, the only fresh air I get is what drafts through the castle. Weekends are the only time I have uninterrupted access to the student potions laboratory, if no one else is there catching up on assignments, which they're usually not. Anyone that does come to that neglected wing of the castle is usually scared off in short order by my glacial unfriendliness.

Early on at Hogwarts I got the reputation for being too fussy to like the outdoors, but nothing could be farther from the truth. It still feels unnatural to go around in the mud holding up your robe like a ninny, but it's better than thinking about the freedom I once knew, climbing up the trellises growing inside my old house, knocking down lichens and shed wallworm skins to my mother, who is waving up at her son clothed in tattered hand-me-downs. From that height I can't see the shadow across her face; she can't see the unnatural worry in mine; and we are perfectly happy when I shimmy down and bury my face in her robe. Just keep your eyes open to not see her face—I'm telling myself on this day in Magical Creatures.

I haven't thought so much on my mother in a long time, but the memories suddenly set on me from all sides with a new sharpness.

On bad-weather days the instructor, Professor Isle, takes selections from her magical bestiary deck of cards and it's almost as good as the real thing—minus the mud. I like her, Professor Isle. She's the only member of the staff to treat me completely naturally. Which may have something to do with the tiny woman being part-elf—probably most-elf —and prone to treating everyone with the same mischievous attitude.

"All right, class, pick your poison." She flings the magic cards in the air, where they hover so you can just glimpse what creature might be tumbling about or shuddering on the other side. People stand on chairs and start grabbing them down with their wands, then they argue and trade cards. We'll be called upon to recite the creatures' strengths and weaknesses in a moment, and if you get them wrong you could end up in the infirmary, as more than one person has learned the hard way about the barbed second tongue of the Whispering Worm.

A card is passed to me and I take it. I don't care. After all my mother's lessons it's very easy for me to see the magical qualities of anything, beast or plant. This one feels green with a hint of yellow. Active, Cool, with a whiff of the salts common to France. I open my eyes.

The teacher has been waiting on me to respond. Now all eyes turn towards me.

"Whatsa matter, Snape, you lost the ring with all the answers?"

I had gradually stopped wearing the Rosetta Ring, but they still remember it, as they do all my weaknesses.

Bragbeak Buzzard"Bragbeak Buzzard," I say with horror, looking at the card with the ridiculous-looking bird glaring at me from under its long fringe of oily black feathers. The bird gets its name from the jointed beak that manages to make it look arrogant and foolish at the same time.

"Which species; be specific, Mr. Snape," the teacher says with mock severity. She thinks she's giving her prize pupil a chance to shine.

"Western Gaul Bulbous Bragbeak Buzzard," I whisper.

The class bursts into laughter at what must look like two equally ridiculous beaked creatures glaring sourly at each other from behind a greasy black mane.

Isle is the only person at Hogwarts to immediately sense when a joke is being played and that it has gone too far. All the rest seem bound to push things a little farther. "And a formidable addition to our bestiary it is," she says in that incongruously loud voice coming from such a small body. "What is its hidden power, Mr. Snape?"

"Its feathers are good for potions," I say and she lets it at that. In fact, its feathers, eggs, flesh and above all, beak, are invaluable for all number of potions having to do with the skin, clear thinking and most famously, love potions. But the bird has to give it to you freely, or its parts will be useless.

Feeling thoroughly unlovable, I duck out of class quickly before Professor Isle's sympathy can ruin my perfectly black humor. My feet, which at least feel the same, lead me out into the storm so that I can feel the intoxicating mixture of its destructive power and all that water pelting my unlovely body.


	7. Chapter 7

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 7: Incongruencies

Sometimes I just go to the infirmary because it's comforting to sleep there. It also gives me an easy out to the rest of the castle when I can't or won't sleep. No one rebukes me for wandering about.

I stop taking Dreamless Sleep when it becomes clear that the dreams are taking over my waking life and they will make me miserable regardless.

At first I think it's just some perverse desire for my aunt that the Wizard Psychology books in the library can rationalize in any number of ways.

Then I start thinking maybe I want to BE my aunt, and there are more Wizard Psychology books (in the restricted section, which is restricted because they don't seem to have tracking magic to see who has looked at what book) that soothe me with the not-unprecedented phenomenon of Wizard Transvestism and Transsexualism.

Why would I be seeing Aunt Adele, of all women, in the mirror? She's hardly an enviable specimen of femininity. Shoved to the back of a restricted shelf I find a large book. Its binding is covered with mold but its pages are made out of a resilient substance. Only on the title page can I discover its name:

Bigham's Big Book of Sexual Incongruencies.

from Bighams Big Book of Sexual IncongruenciesIt is filled with the most nauseating sexual perversions presented in a matter-of-fact tone, which somehow makes people who desire their broomsticks or fall in love with their frogs seem all the more wrongheaded. Dr. Bigham, who appears to have been a well-respected voice on these unspoken topics years ago, believed that "normal, generative" sexual relations were to be found in "activities that matched the different, but reflective, strengths of the male and female," the natural Congruence of which could be seen in the end result—a child. He included pages and pages of charts and tables to prove this theory with the mechanics behind various magical reactions, but they go straight over my head.

Any "pastime, longing or pursuit" that was not part of the natural order of things was bound to cause the degeneration of all persons (or animals, objects, etc.) involved in the short or long-term. Thus, he gave suggestions for identifying Incongruents by various signs and portents, also with potions, which I duly prepare and slather on myself to reveal the offending degeneration but saw no result.

I hastily cast a charm to erase my magical signature from the books on sexual problems just in case the rest of the library's magical indexing system does in fact reach here, but I go back again and again to Bigham's Book with no remark from the librarian. I am terrified to spend too long on any given picture, but fragments of images tug at me, hinting of forbidden desires I turn away from and then can't locate when I want to figure out what they were.

Could it be that I have some strange Incongruence like the ones Bigham wrote in his extensive treatise on Transsexualism? I have no special love for my body, but no quarrel with it either. Really I feel like one seamless piece of misery—how can I merely think of getting rid of a couple male parts, when the whole thing is awkward and wrong by its very nature in some way I can't explain?

For the first time I wonder about Spagyrics for people. What is the color of my magical nature? Am I hot or cold? Active or passive? Could such qualities determine these strange feelings that I sense are not like those of the boys my age?

It is cause for many nights in the library, but the books have frustratingly little information about the patterns that make witches and wizards unique. That every magician has a magical signature has been thrown since the early 1800s with the advent of the Theory of Individual Direction, and as that doctor who attended my dead mother told me, medicine is the study of this fingerprint interacting with known remedies.

The latter are my specialty, but I've not given two thoughts to the former part of the equation. My future suddenly seems broader than the potion-brewing I've been doing since childhood. What if I should think about going into wizard medicine? Or at least refining my potion science to include it?

There are various spells that are supposed to help determine a wizard's qualities, but none of them seem to work right. They're gleaned from patchy documentation in old books written in dead languages that even my Gift and my Ring can't make sense of, so something must be lost in translation.

"The subject shall press his right palm over his left and intone the following: 'May my indissoluble Self be revealed in the patterns of this Salt, scattered as my Talents were before they came to rest in my Wand-'"

"The Adept will sit in the center of a circle, with the following potions arranged at the cardinal points and the signaled points in between. He shall let his wand rest in his hand until, at the third recitation of the verses below, it begins to stir. The qualities of the chosen substance will help begin to reveal his inner predilections. The same ritual may be performed with small animals under Petrificus, or books, should the Adept be searching for an answer to a problem."

None of the techniques tell anything at all about me when I surround myself with some of the worst Incongruencies from Bigham's Book and sit for hours, staring at my still wand. I don't know whether to be relieved or concerned that whatever I desire is so exotically deranged that it wasn't catalogued by the expert on the subject.

I should have found it suspect when no one bothers me about my liberal forays into the restricted section. But most of all I should have been concerned by the librarian, Miss Bundle, studiously avoiding my eyes when she asks, "Find everything you were looking for, Mr. Snape?"

Other than that, it is like everyone was leaving me blessedly alone for that time, and I use every moment to try and determine why my aunt's face stares back at me from every reflective surface, and to alternately understand and run from my own sexual tastes. I take to brushing my teeth by feel and shave with my eyes closed, something my housemates don't comment upon. Looking back, this grace period in which to explore my own lack of grace was all Dumbledore, him engineering some spell to leave me to my search for information. As if he couldn't have saved us all a lot of trouble and confusion if he'd just told me.

It occurs to me to demand some kind of explanation from him, many times, but I can't think of what my question is, or if I can I can't find his suite of rooms where they usually are. They seem to have moved, or someone gets in the way and asks me a stupid question or knocks my books out of my hands. He's scarcely spoken to me since first year, anyway.

And all the time I can't tell if I'm running desperately towards something or away from it.

Since I seem to have the run of the place, I've been in and out of the infirmary as often as I like, asking Lessmore questions about what she does and why. She is happy to talk about her training, and I consider asking to apprentice with her to see if I like Mediwizardry, though I can't honestly see my bedside manner improving any more than these annoying transfiguration lessons are helping me.

_Hermes is the Primal Source._

_After so many injuries_

_have been done to the human race,_

_I flow forth,_

_by divine decree_

_and assisted by the Art,_

_as a healing giving medicine._

_He who is able to, drink out of me._

_He who wants, purify himself in me._

_He who dares, jump into my depths._

_Drink, brother, and live._

_Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz_

One night that must have been in early November because it is shortly after my 16th birthday, I go to the astronomy tower to get the fresh air I crave. Why do they keep us shut up in this castle so much? It breeds the kind of airless intrigues Hogwarts is drowning in.

"Can't sleep?"

I whip my head to see where the voice came from. Usually I hear or feel anyone approaching, which they don't, as a rule.

"Evidently not," I say to the student who is suddenly right in front of me. It's James Potter. A long string of taunts from him flashes in my memory and I say in a more unfriendly tone, "Except officially students are to be in bed, so please don't get in the way of my Somnambulism. I won't be held responsible for what I do while asleep."

"Oh, I know you won't," the Gryffindor says dismissively, and I am taken aback. What does he mean? "That's sleep, isn't it? It's you, but not you?" He explains in a not-unfriendly tone.

"And you wander about the astronomy tower in the middle of the night to be sort of not yourself?" I ask. "Is being a Gryffindor so taxing?"

He gives me a withering look. "I would have hoped you were a bastard to me because you just don't like anybody or you have some specific hatred for me in particular, but don't be a git with all that house rivalry as an excuse."

Potter disarms me yet again. Of course I think the house rivalry is stupid, but what do you talk about with other students? I've had no occasion to learn. "I wonder what we'll have for pudding tomorrow?" Is the only thing that surfaces in my suddenly murky brain. My mind desperately searches for something to say about Quidditch but I come up empty-handed.

"Then what's your problem?" I ask quietly.

"What makes you think I have a problem?" he says with a smile while he fidgets with a handkerchief I hadn't noticed in his hand. He blushes a little but keeps my gaze. He's been wanking! Relieving his frustrations in that hanky. I can feel my skin burning like someone overturned a pot of Passionflower Petaljuice over my head and it's slowly burning dripping down my forehead, cheeks, neck, collarbone, chest…

"I don't like wanking in the dormitory," he says as if it's the most natural thing in the world to be talking about his masturbatory preferences. "Everyone else does it, but sometimes it gets to be a little much—everyone ignoring what everyone else is doing and then rushing to change the sheets in the morning."

"So you don't like hiding it or you don't like the audience?" I ask, feeling the blush seeping down farther than a blush has a right to.

He laughs but his eyes flash with something else. "Five points for Slytherin." He thinks for a moment. "I don't think all audiences would be a problem, actually, but I want them to look me in the eyes instead of skulking in the dark while they're listening, maybe. Seems more honest." I can see that the thought surprises him as much as it does me. "What about you?" he finishes, and it could mean what are my wanking predilections, how do I feel about bed linens, it could be anything or nothing.

"I like being in the dark," I say softly. No one thinks I'm ugly in the dark.

His eyes travel to the bright moonlight bathing the astronomy tower terrace then flit back to me before I can think of a better excuse for why I'm there. "Then I'll show you a dark place. You're not afraid are you?"

I'm suddenly very aware that I'm in my pajamas under my robe. "No, but tell me where we're going first," I say with bravado, my heart pounding with what must be fear at the crafty smile on Potter's lips.

He's taking me to the Gryffindor Hall. He's sneaking me in, a Slytherin, to show me all of the boys murmuring hot and sticky under the sheets.

"How will I get in with no one noticing? And why do they let you roam around at night?" I ask suddenly. "Madam Lessmore basically lets me do what I want, but—"

He shows me the Invisibility Cloak. I have a few paranoid moments trying to think of any times when he's been the one to spill my soup on my lap or worse, watched me in the library. He sees what I'm thinking and laughs. "I don't use it during the day, and at night I've only seen you in the infirmary a couple times. You and Lessmore are too boring to watch for long. All that talk of potions!"

I laugh. Boring is code for "grown up." I've never felt it was good to be the overly serious boy that I am, but I sense a kind of respect about my relationship with the nurse.

While I'm laughing he throws the cloak over me. It's strange. Slimy. It traps my breath and suddenly I'm unbearably hot, but I can't see my feet when I'm walking, which is somehow disorienting. While I'm trying to get the hang of walking, he slips under the cloak to stand in front of me.

"Don't worry, I don't bite," he says facing forward, and stretches one hand behind him to pull me closer so no parts of us stick out of the cloak. I have no choice but to wrap my taller frame around him, and I feel unbearably warm as we stumble forward. He laughs as we work out a rhythm but I'm doing all I can to walk in time so he can't tell I'm aroused. We end up at the Gryffindor portrait of the Fat Lady, he says, "apple-fisk" and we're in.

I've never given two thoughts to being in this place, but now that I'm here I do feel a little thrill at being somewhere I shouldn't. Or maybe it's being there for the express purpose of watching people wank, which is something I've not done intentionally. Either way I have a raging erection. Potter puts his hand on it at the same time he puts his hand on my mouth. Then he moves my hand to his equally blatant need, and finally moves his hand to his mouth, as if to say, it's all right, look all you want, but don't make a sound.

The first moan comes from startlingly close. Potter lets out a breathy chuckle. "Anderson. A real randy goat," he whispers in my ear.

Soon the slight disturbance we'd made with our entrance in everyone's collective sleep settles and a symphony of sighs and groans and squeaking bedsprings starts to rise up around us. We're in that stifling tent of a cloak and all I can feel are the rocking motions of his body as he tugs at his organ under the robes. I have never been so grateful in all my life as when my hand closes upon my own secret length of skin. I close my eyes so that I don't think about what I look like, the unlovely gangly Snape, because by now I've memorized the curve of his Adam's apple down to the hollow of his throat. The flush that clusters around the edges of his face while the cheeks themselves remain pale and intent. When did I have time to notice these things during the few moments in the Astronomy Tower? Why has this catalogue for physical details never revealed itself in my brain before?

I can feel the stiff bristles of his hair against my face as he leans into his task, completely unashamed—a quality I would come to associate more than any other with this boy who is in many ways a man. He's so close—I can feel the muscles of his back tense when I hear a low chuckle and my eyes fly open. He's looking at me intently and laughing as he comes, and in response I come in surprise, a dry jolt in my pajamas. His eyes are shining at me in the darkness. Hermes, is there anything that will make him look away? I feel my climaxing face being stored away for some unfathomable purpose and I do my best to draw my dignity back around myself. A snide remark is welling to my lips when he places a finger there.

We walk, loose-limbed and much more in concert, together out of the dormitory and into a quiet corner, where he laughs again. He's doubled over with laughter and every time he looks at me he breaks out into fresh peals. I watch him coldly, making a note in my indelible list of scores to settle. I'll put something in a butterbeer that makes him into a hunchback—

"Have you had your fill?" I say finally. I'm cold now that the cloak is off and want to lie down and pretend this little excursion didn't happen.

He breaks off mid-laugh. A wounded, almost craven look comes over his face. He sweeps the cloak over his face so I can't study the expression further. "Not at all," he says softly. "Meet me at the tower tomorrow night at eleven," and he is gone.

_The Mumia coming from the body of a person or animal continues to remain in sympathetic relationship with the Mumia contained in such a person, and they act magnetically upon each other." This is called the transplantation of diseases, "and many practices of sorcery are based upon that fact._

_Paracelsus, quoted in THEOSOPHY, Vol. 26, No. 5, March, 1938_

I wander back to the Slytherin tower and the more familiar sounds of these boys' arousal are oppressive, but I force myself to stay. What are they dreaming about? It must be the girl students, or perhaps hazily imagined women, but surely they weren't dreaming about each other. Up until this point I'd been running so hard from my incestuous imaginings of my Aunt Adele, or the strange concept that I might want to be her, that these fears had crowded out any possibility that might be much worse—that I was apparently interested in boys.

I sit there in the dark and discern a shoulder, a tousled head, a haunch—these familiar sights are now a threat, because I could apparently want them, and thus, be rejected by them.

I don't meet James the next night. For what? To be the subject of his sport? I try to talk shop with Lessmore but I feel irritable and return to my dormitory. I just lie like a board in my bed and let the desire and the self-hatred slip over me as easily as everyone's eyes slip over me. I'm not just ugly, I'm definitely Incongruous. The idea of myself as a puzzle piece that doesn't fit in a giant jigsaw puzzle torments me as I go through the motions of being a student, brushing my teeth next to them, changing into that unflattering getup in the changing room before sport, eating my toast next to these boys as if I had a right to their trust, when all along I'm a traitor! I want them! All of them, including the pudgiest, spottiest ones, are good for hours of non-wanking torment because I try my best not to give in to stimulating myself while picturing boys.

At dinner one night a few days later, after I'd had ample time to become aware of my unholy bent, after I'd supplied all the jeers and cruel songs that they would make up when they found out, simpering the s's in my name and evoking the French accent I haven't had for years but seems now like a harbinger of the hatchet-faced pansy I apparently am—

A Poly-Cracker cracks open over my head. The contents aren't Gelatinous Bile or a mist to make my hair fall out, as I expect—this time it's just bits of paper, but they're damnably hard to catch. They all seem to get under my robes and I'm frantically trying to shoo them out while the entire school splits their sides laughing.

I don't glare. I deserve this. I don't know how they know, but this is only the beginning of the jeers about what my traitorous body wants.

Rising with burning cheeks, I get up from the table and stomp out so I can get the tickling little bits out from under my robes. I don't make it to the dormitory before something falls out of my clothing. All the little bits have formed themselves back into a single parchment covered in boyish scrawl.

You never came back, so I had to contact you somehow. I'll teach you the spell sometime. Or maybe you can explain some of that stuff I heard you talking about with Lessmore last night while you were playing Wizard Whist. Meet me at the astronomy tower at eleven tonight. Don't make me wait again.

I start to read the message again when it crumbles into dust.

Staring at the fragments, my brain is unable to make sense of what I have just seen. Are we to have some sort of pajama-clad tutoring session? Will he have one or two Gryffindors concealed under his cloak so that he has an audience as he makes fun of me? Because he must have known I wasn't just wanking in general, I was wanking at him. Why else would he laugh? I'm not setting myself up for that.

But he obviously went back. At least that one time. Maybe more than once. And he watched me in the infirmary. Why?

There is a black taste at the back of my throat. The only thing I know to do is face it. Face my fate and whatever cruel sport the Potter boy has in store for me.

I go. Feeling exposed without the cloak—though Filch has long become accustomed to me having the run of the place—I walk up to the astronomy tower and feel his presence next to me, a certainty that boils up from my groin. Potter stands there for a long time and I think he is quite unusually cruel to make me stew in my own juice. I am glumly expecting a prank while my mind supplies every inch of his skin I've ever seen and then fills in the blanks.

I feel an invisible hand touch my chest and flinch as it appears and floats there alone in the night air.

"Be still," Potter says from inside the cloak. My heart pounding, I am still except for my blood. The hand traces over my narrow chest and sharp shoulders. It moves slowly over the knobs in my spine.

I am trembling so much that he can't go any lower. At any moment he's going to reveal that he has Crabbe or Anderson in there with him. "Why are you doing this to me?" I ask. "I just want to be left alone, mind my own business."

The hand has traveled to the front. "I think at least one part of you is curious," he says, tracing lightly over my member, releasing it so it curves out like an accusation pointing incriminatingly towards him. I close my eyes and feel the magic coursing through me like I never have. Not since I became accustomed to using a wand. But suddenly I'm a wild boy again, a boy who makes magic with his whole body. My hands open and close, passing the unbearable heat back and forth while the disembodied touch on my penis drives me crazy. I feel like I'm 20 feet tall. I feel right for the first time in my life. This, this is who I am. This is what I want—

Suddenly he throws the cloak off and launches his mouth at mine. Taken by surprise, I topple over and he falls along with me. I struggle underneath him to shield myself from the prank that must have been planned for me while I am vulnerable, but he is stabbing his tongue in my mouth and I feel this electricity on his lips that maddens my own. I'm kissing back, sucking, swallowing this delicious sensation he's offering me freely from his mouth.

Finally I wrench away. "What do you mean by this, Potter?"

He looks at me and starts laughing. That laugh again. Why did he do all this just to make fun of me? I try to push him off of me, but then he closes his mouth over mine and I feel like I'm flying. This must be what they talk about in the treatises on intoxicants.

Our bodies don't stop moving, our mouths, our hands, until we're crashing into each other and gasping and crying out.

Finally he rolls off me and watches me with an unreadable expression.

"Will you meet me again? I'll let you know the time and place." And he teaches me the spell for Fragmentus so I can reply to him. Then he is gone. I can tell because some filament inside of me has ceased to vibrate with the call of his skin.

I lie against the cold stone slabs and hope to all that is holy that no one else has an Invisibility Cloak. Potter knows what I want. Someone knows who I am underneath the schoolboy robes, and the idea that he might want it too and be just as vulnerable is too strange to be entertained. Why would he laugh at me?

There's nothing in his manner at breakfast or in our shared classes to suggest that the boy knows me. He's always been one of the most likely to make fun of me, and that hasn't stopped. If anything, it's gotten worse. Usually it's pretty easy to retain a stoic façade, but this ritual taunting after our two intimate encounters unnerves me. The sexual component to his jests is plain as day to me, and so I'm afraid of it being obvious to someone else.

I sneer back out of habit, then actually reach for my wand when he casts a spell that makes my long hair stand on end. No one has done that since second year! My hand closes on my wand and stops. Is this what he wants? An altercation? My hand relaxes and people lose interest. I'm left standing there foolishly as his friends close ranks around him.

That night at dinner I get a message folded in my napkin. The fragments of parchment fall onto my lap and the tickling as they get inside my robes is tantalizingly sensual but I butter a piece of bread like nothing is happening. There is the usual collection of Slytherin gibes against the other houses, but for the most part, my peers don't have much to say.

Are the other houses so boring? Because my house is the most dreadfully dull collection of sycophants you could ever hope not to meet. They all fawn over some of the older boys, but I try my hardest to not notice anyone above my grade for fear that they notice me. The ones my age I can handle—I know a little more magic than they do, but the older ones will make quick work of the illusion that I am aloof and collected. And now there is the ready blackmail material of what I really want.

I get through dinner without my stone-faced gaze faltering once. That trial over with, I take an unused stairway so that I can open the parchment that has assembled itself right between my undershorts and the skin on my stomach.

You must come tonight. And tell me all about this. It's not fair. Meet me in the second storeroom to the left after you go past the kitchens.

Feeling grateful that he's chosen neutral, relatively hidden territory, I obey the summons because those three childish words "It's not fair" are impossible to ignore, and equally impossible to relate to myself. What have I done to him besides respond to his touch? Nevertheless, I take the precaution of glamouring myself to match the color of the castle stones, just in case Filch or anyone is about.

I slip in through the heavy door and scan the darkness for possible Gryffindors. Since no one seems to be there, I dispense with the wand niceties and say Lumos into my cupped hands. A ball of light floats up and I can see discarded furniture and other odds and ends. On an old four-poster bed lays James Potter, erect and exposed.

"I thought it was just a rumor," he says, staring at my hands.

"I'll show you sometime. I learned when I was little," I say, embarrassed. This isn't what I came to talk about.

"Can you really do anything you do with your wand with your hands?" he asks.

"I'm a little out of practice because they didn't let me do it for so long. But it's kind of different. I don't know how to describe it. Like I have to really mean it to use my hands, and I need both."

He pulls me over to the bed. "Show me," he says but I can't begin to mouth a charm before he has his mouth over mine and he's put my hands to me. He's murmuring something I can't catch and he's all over me, pulling off my clothes, running his mouth over my chest, my belly, my everything.

I sit up and look at him imploringly until he grins and takes off his clothes as well. I run my hands over every inch as if I can drink in the sight better with my fingers. I grasp the short hairs at his groin to stop him from what he is doing—so well, so damnably well.

"What are we doing?" I ask, unable to wrest my eyes from his body.

He starts laughing that laugh again and to shut him up I resume what he was just doing to me. He must get off on humiliating me, and maybe I like him doing it. There was a little about Incongruents like that in the books I read. He's making these pained noises and I pull back. "Am I hurting you?" I ask.

He laughs again, just a little, and positions our bodies to pleasure us together, kissing me languidly, maddeningly, and I'm thinking about the luxury of being naked, naked with someone, all that skin, when we come together. He doesn't seem to notice that I don't ejaculate at all.

My fingers trace the planes of his face, his amazingly normal nose, his lips. Severus Snape, ill-starred child, is suddenly favored in love.

That's what this is, isn't it?

I move to kiss him again softly but he pulls back, watchful. "Will you come again?"

"Tonight?" I ask, smiling. "I'd have to be convinced." My tongue darts between his and my knee separates his legs. I'm on top this time and the awareness fill me with a pounding desire to shape his form with mine. I will never come to the end of this body.

"Mmmm-no, I mean it," he says. "Will you come the next time I can get away?" We've talked so little; I have no idea what other things he might do in the evenings.

"Lessmore expects me several nights a week—no sense in letting anyone into our business," I say, sidestepping the issue that we're two males and thus have extra reasons not to be caught holding hands or worse. "But for some reason they let me wander around to my heart's content, so I can get away at least three nights a week."

We make some sort of fumbling promise to see each other very soon, and he hugs me. This gesture, more than any other, reaches me to my core. No one has embraced me like that other than my mother, and then, a very long time ago. I tighten my arms around him and feel very vulnerable. "I never thought anyone would want me," I say to his hair.

He looks up at me with that look that makes me want to scream. What? What is it?

"I'll send word soon," he says.

But he doesn't.

His taunts during the day get worse and worse. His head of house, Hawke, intervenes, looking at me quizzically when I don't defend myself. It's odd, but I feel no need to. Since I began these meetings with James (I call him James now) I'm so aware of him—the real him that I've kissed and licked and more—that I can feel him from across the Quidditch field, where I go sometimes now because I've developed a vicarious interest in the ridiculous pastime. I don't enjoy watching it; I enjoy feeling him enjoying it. The way I feel the flush of pleasure he gets around his wide circle of friends. He has that much caring to give out? It makes me wonder.

But he gives something very different to me. Anxiously. With an urgency that seems startling in such a boy, though I have nothing to compare it to. I feel something ripening between us so tangibly that one side of my face feels hot when he's in the same room. I don't feel anxious for our next meeting because a note that is the essence of James trills in my ears from two floors below. I do wonder at the delay. Maybe his many friends take up his evenings?

It bothers me a little that he wouldn't be able to tell them about us, but then, if I had friends what would I say? "Madam Lessmore, guess what, I'm an Incongruent. Can I borrow your copy of Potion Prattle Weekly?" Doubtless she has a treatment to fix it and then I'll fall for Susie Whitlock. I don't want to be cured of what I do with James, so I'll keep my own counsel.

When James punches me in the middle of the library it brings my rosy daydreams to a standstill.

He's that close to me in public, pounding me with his fists when he should be slinking his naked body up my equally naked form. My brain is trying to process this when he hits me again. Something crunches.

He's broken my famous nose!

I've set it and used both hands as a healing charm before Miss Bundle has time to separate us with a bolt from her wand.

"Mr. Snape," she says as a prefect leads the struggling James away. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I snap, my strange tranquility shattered by that odd look she's giving me. After all, I was fighting, or being fought at. Shouldn't I be punished for scrapping in the library?

"I've already set it. Lessmore will give me the mixture I require and there will be no more to it," I say with my hand over my nose. She doesn't correct me for not calling the mediwitch Madam, and lets me walk myself up to the infirmary.

Lessmore stands back and lets me mix my own concoction as if she were watching a trained hippogriff stomp out the answers to complex equations with its hoof. I have an urge to go find the Elvin gamemistress or maybe a nice mouse. Anything that will just look at me normally.

I swallow the mixture and the swelling abates almost immediately. Taking two jars of ointment I mix a little of both together in my hand before spreading it on top of my nose. Knowing I look ridiculous with the pink goo on my face, I sit there miserably. She pulls out a pack of cards and we play Wizard-Whist, just like when I first came into her care and was unable to talk English.

I smile at the memory and she smiles too. "Daggers are trumps," she says, and for a moment, everything is all right.

She lets me sleep there because it's my second home after all. The unguent has settled into my skin, mostly, and only when I roll over do I hear the crinkle of parchment. I have the presence of mind to wait until she retires to the cot she keeps in her office for nights on duty and then I make out the familiar scrawl by conjuring a weak light.

I'm sorry. It's the only thing I could think of to get a message to you. I'll be in detention for a while, I'm sure, and Hawke has his eye on me, but I still must see you. I just don't know how. I know you'll think of something. Let me know when you do. Let me know how much you want it—all of it.

Yours,

J

I automatically reach for the Rosetta Ring where I used to wear it on my third finger. Nothing about this James Potter makes any sense. (Except when it makes that kind of sense). Why couldn't he float me a note under the table at dinner? Why would he choose a fistfight as the best way to cover for passing me a message?

Severus Snape, you have no self-control, I tell myself while I write a couple of drafts of the message during History of Magic. Severus Snape, you are a pitiful pansy, I tell myself as I lay completely still in bed and do the new handless wank technique I've perfected, all the while picturing the small patch of hair at the center of his chest, the way his lips quiver right before he ejaculates. His rough hair between my fingers while I feel the power of his mouth.

Tonight. Slytherin tower, take your first right, then two lefts, second door on your right. Password "eggwhite."

I want it all.

It's only a pallid reflection of my true feelings but the terse message is probably better than the more panting alternative. I dawdle a little at class change so that I can intone the charm that will leave the fragmented message in his seat for when he enters History class after me. It's easy to key it to his magical signature. I can feel his spicy-sweet energy on the bench from where he left it two days ago.

The task completed, I feel the black taste at the back of my throat. Is this what it's like to be a man—to be completely a slave to sex? My desire to feel—everything—about sex, about James, is overpowering my rather good mind, which is telling me to have a rousing game of Whist in the infirmary and call it a night.


	8. Chapter 8

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 8: Exponents

There are several classes and another annoying Transfiguration tutorial to go to between now and the moment when I can continue my explorations, however. "Can't we just not and say we did?" I drawl at Professor Eccles, and she looks as though she wants to agree with me.

We try inanimate objects for a change and discover that I have some talent for changing myself into metal objects, but not wood, though I can't remain convincingly still. "There's nothing I'd rather do than be a proper teakettle for you, but how do you want me to stop breathing, Professor?" I say sarcastically.

"Your left hand still looks a little steely," she points out. "Now let's try fabric. Or would you rather be a liquid?" she asks brightly. I need to ask Lessmore if this woman has a China Cheer habit. No one is this perky.

Finally it is nighttime. Normally I feel very little for my fellow Slytherin, but I do feel a twinge about having given out the house password. If James decides to get back at me for some reason, I can be living with a houseful of enemies until graduation. As a loner, I know that there are some fates worse than being ignored as I am now.

Then why did I choose the fate where a confusing man-boy named James Potter may or may not be waiting for me in a disused storeroom, where he might kiss me or might re-break my nose?

No one pays any attention to me leaving my bed. I rarely spend a full night there, and they've stopped caring why.

This time I do leave long enough for the portraits to see me go out, but I come back having done a cloaking spell, so that they can see me but don't recognize me as Severus Snape. It's one of the few things I learned from my reading about magical identities, and probably wouldn't hold up in front of anyone who knows what to look for, but hopefully it can keep the portraits from blabbing.

It's very early still, so I pull the book out of my robe and read awhile to distract myself from what I'm about to do with this boy whose hot promise I can feel throbbing within the stones of the castle. "He's crazy," a voice in my head says about James. "But you knew that when he wanted you to begin with." "This is what happens when two boys get together," another voice sounding like my grandmother's says. "It's unnatural. Of course you fight." I've been staring at the same page, listening to the unpleasant voices repeating passages from Bigham's Book in my head for some time when the door opens. I sit up and the book falls to the floor.

There's no one there. The door closes and then it's James all over.

All over me.

"I can't believe I'm here in Slytherin," he says breathlessly while his hands fumble with my robes. "I can't believe I'm going to be there," he adds with a shy glance in my direction and his voice cracks a little.

I feel a stab of desire that might just be fear. "We don't have to—Maybe we need to talk."

"Talk?" he gets that incredulous look that comes right before the laugh. "Don't you want to—?" His hand is working fast. "Don't you want to—"

He whispers the impropriety. It's the first time he's used such a word and it embarrasses me for some reason while some deep ancestral pull unhinges something in my body. "Yeees," I say, about to spasm.

He stops and pushes me backward. I recognize a few charms rattled off in quick succession. He's warded the door, set up a sound shield, and, oh, something else happens that lets me know he's really planned out the mechanics of something I've scarcely imagined. He takes off our clothes while I sit there, transfixed, not sure if I really want to be doing this. Is it curiosity? Love?

Then James fixes his mouth on me and there are no more questions. My whole body writhes and now I'm muttering in some collection of languages. Por le Ancien et Mystique Ordre de la Rose-Croixs! He never did that before.

He switches the ecstasy to the other side and then says, "What is this?" There is a faint bluish mark trailing down my chest.

"I don't know," I say. "Please do it some more." And he does for a minute of perfect bliss before he moves his mouth and I can't complain.

"Do you want it?" he asks, eye level to my crotch, which is a difficult position to demand a considered answer from.

"Want what?" I have enough presence of mind to tease.

"Me in you," he says, and we both lurch forward at the bald statement. Everything up until now has been as natural as swimming, but this, it's like a knife has been unsheathed between us and there is danger. He doesn't give me a chance to say anything. I feel something begin to come undone deep inside me. I'm scared and start to say something but he puts his hand over my mouth and I feel a combination of arousal and terror that is irresistible. I lean back and watch the utterly intent expression on his face. He looks up at my eyes and his hand over my mouth and does something.

"Hermès!" I mouth into his hand. I pull it from my mouth. "What was that? What did you—"

He's staring straight into my eyes and he does it again, and again, until I'm begging for something, I don't know what, until he says another incantation and it's happening. He's got hold of my wrists and is pressing me apart. He's looking at me as if I'm everything he's ever desired. "Say it," he says. "Say how much you want it."

I realize I've been begging in other languages, so I switch back to English.

It only takes one particular word and that's all we need to pound together so violently that I hope he did a charm against people feeling the shaking of the bed. It is good. It is the best thing I have ever known. This beautiful boy becoming undone over me, and I'm doing this, I'm making him feel that, and all the while he's making me feel—. He stops.

"Don't stop," I cry in a voice I don't recognize. "This is wonderful."

He looks down at my chest, which is covered with blue. "I think it's coming from your skin," he says and traces with a finger. I'm terribly embarrassed and confused, but it feels too good to refuse. I feel some essence of me being dragged into his mouth and I would give up anything, including what we were just doing, for that feeling.

He's back inside me again and I change my mind when he kisses me. There is no me, there is no him, there is merely one ecstatic piece of flesh rolling over and over itself. One climax follows close upon the other.

We kiss and lay silently for a long time.

"Do you think anyone heard us?" I ask finally. "Or felt us? I feel like we could have shaken down the entire Slytherin tower."

"Don't think about them," James says. "Think about ways to do this more often." He runs his hands over my hips and looks at me for a long time. I am awed that someone would find me not only suitable, but very suitable for what we just did.

"Agreed," I say. He leaves under his Invisibility Cloak and I spend some time in the cupboard before I dare emerge. No one seems to be the wiser, but I've had time to remember that he and I were supposed to talk about something. Oh yes, he broke my nose! It seems so long ago. After what we just did, it hardly seems to matter. It seems like there is more to think about at this moment, but I feel far too good to care. Life is full of color and savor; I can smell each of the other boys' unique skin as I make my way to bed, but all I want is to lose myself in James.

In my dreams during those brief hours of sleep I dream that I'm in a hall of mirrors. A million different reflections stretch out before me, and I know what I don't want to see—Aunt Adele. I don't really know what I look like any more. There's scores of male faces before me, and I don't know which is really mine. But I want them. Each in his own way is infinitely desirable. I vaguely think James wouldn't like me thinking that way when I hear his voice. "Seen anything you fancy?" he asks, his nakedness dazzling me from a full-length mirror, and then I wake up.

I feel so splendid at the breakfast table I think I'm actually caught smiling.

The knot of misery that James has been loosing deep inside of me has freed up my mind as well. It's easier to simply focus on the moment, and I'm able to capture concepts from my instructors' lectures that I had never noticed before. In Sport I've jumped over the heads of my fellow students twice without thinking that normally I'd be standing there sulking. Transfiguration tutoring actually seems to be going better. I catch Eccles thinking that at last she'll be relieved of tutoring me.

I capture a piece of the nearly impossible-to-locate Animate Lichen that can sometimes be found in one of the towers and present it, along with the equally rare nest of a Winter Wasp to Lessmore, who is beside herself with what she'll do using these rare therapeutic ingredients.

There is so much to do now that I am not miserable that I scarcely give a thought to why I haven't heard from the lover whose body I taste like honey flowing across my tongue at the oddest moments. It's a tawny orange, this feeling I associate with this young man who Bigham himself would have been forced to recognize as beautiful.

When I don't hear from James for several days, I assume it's because he's still serving detention. A little gaggle of Slytherins collects around me sometimes when one of James' gang comes too close, but nothing can detract from my wonderful mood. I feel whole for the first time in my life. There are so many things I want to share with James—if I can keep him off me for a second! A sly smile at the power I have to attract him flits across my face.

I know I'm not good at talking about my feelings, but until now I've not had many to talk about. The next several days go by thinking pleasantly about a few things I'd like to say to this boy who's adopted me. If we were to actually talk maybe we could study together. It's prosaic, but it's one of the previously solitary activities where I've discovered some company might be nice.

The days go by with Severus Snape living in a rose-colored cloud like a schoolgirl, and if anyone notices, I certainly don't care. Madam Lessmore and I play cards and argue good-naturedly about the way she organizes her storeroom (alphabetically, instead of by magical property) and I volunteer to top up her supply of Dreamless Sleep if she can arrange for me to use the fully equipped staff laboratory. "Alone," I specify, thinking of that Cabinet woman hovering and mucking up my magic. Then I decide to sleep in my own bed that night. "Good night, Madam," I say and we share the solemn bow I used to give her when I was ten.

I walk down the corridors barely feeling my feet touching the stone. The castle feels literally alive to me tonight. I guess a healthy house is something you don't usually think about, because I've not really thought of Hogwarts as a living thing the way I know my parents' house was a sickly entity. But tonight I can almost feel the great stone beast shifting contentedly like a great cat that's been scratched in just the right place.

The blinding spell is on me before I've realized it, and I'm dragged into a closet before I can fight back.

"What- What is this?" I sputter. My wand is knocked out of my hands and I snort at the futile effort to disarm me. The spell is removed but it is pitch black. "Lumos," comes my incantation and in the light I see a Gryffindor I barely know glowering at me. "Sirius Black," I sneer. "If you wanted me to make you a Stamina Salve all you have to do is ask me coming in or out of meals like everyone else. It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Shut up!" he says more angrily than I think necessary.

"If it's something truly embarrassing I'm surprised you would come to me," I pursue reflectively. "Although having Lessmore clucking over your nether bits wouldn't be pleasant."

"I want to know what you've done to him!" he demands fiercely. "Was it a potion? Are you extorting him until he pays for the antidote? What have you done with my best friend?"

Until that moment I didn't know Sirius was the best of the many friends James had, but it makes sense, I think. They're the most courageous among the courageous Gryffindors. And probably the two most attractive, though I didn't seek James out for that. I didn't seek him out at all, actually. I'm suddenly stifled in this tiny closet with this strange boy who has as much hair as I do and is a couple inches taller. "Potter? I didn't do anything to him. Didn't you hear? I let him break my nose without protest, I'm such a gentleman."

He raises his eyebrows and looks up from where he's been studying the ball of light I made. "That's not the word I'd use for you."

The abuse I'd been steeling myself against for months is here, and I don't want to think about how he knew.

"I don't know what this is about, but if I did have theoretical extracurricular interests, I would think the last place you would want to be was stuck in a tiny cupboard with me," I say, trying to keep things cryptic.

"James is not that way, he isn't! I've known him since before Hogwarts. We played together as children. I know him inside and out and there's just no way." He seems truly aggrieved, which makes it easy to gibe at him.

"And little Sirius is distressed that his best playmate developed some adult interests as he grew up?"

"Even if he were to do something—like that—with some bloke, he'd still be my best mate, but there's something abnormal about it. He twists himself in knots when you don't answer his letters. It's making him ill. If you like boys, like him, why don't you act like it?"

I am taken aback. "What letters? I answer every one immediately."

He laughs bitterly. "You mean to say that you haven't gotten off seeing his face when you trample on a note he's passed you, or when he makes some excuse to talk to you and you just turn away?"

My sarcastic demeanor is deserting me. "I don't know what you mean," I say. "James is the one that keeps me waiting for days until I find a Fragmented letter in my pocket or in my napkin at the table. I don't hold it against him because he has a wide social circle," I glare at Sirius, "and can't get away as easily as I can. I spend half my evenings playing Wizard Whist with Lessmore and the other half brewing potions. You can ask her."

I'm uncomfortably aware that being in these close quarters with another male is having an effect on me, but I'm afraid to just walk out and let Sirius use my tacit acknowledgement of a homosexual affair against me. I shift my position and brush up against his arm in the process of leaning against the wall and resolve to let Black say what he has to say. The glow of light is dimming without my attention so I infuse it with more magic.

"I'd never have thought," Sirius says.

"About me and James? Me neither, as a matter of fact," I say. "I truly didn't look for it, but he's—" I search for the words and while I'm at it, Sirius kisses me.

I struggle but physically he's very strong. I've wound up enough energy in my hands to repel him and then I realize maybe I don't want to. His hands are under my shirt before I can realize what's happening and then we're fighting again in a way that seems designed to bring us closer together. His curly hair is against my face and it feels so strange compared to James' short bristles. It is not unpleasant, but I still feel guilty about it.

My mind is bargaining with me, "If you don't take off your clothes it's not really cheating. You were dragged here under duress—whatever happens now is on Sirius. I wonder what he looks like in the altogether." And he's shoving his tongue down my throat unbelievably far. I melt into his arms. I like being the shorter one. I like the somewhat manic energy with which he's grinding against me.

Finally I use magic to push him away and keep him there. "We can't do this. I care for James. As it is I'm going to have to confess the last five minutes were not totally under duress."

He nods and settles his clothes, looking at me with wide eyes all the while. "What if it were me and James," he says casually.

This is something my 16-year-old mind cannot fathom. "That's impossible," I scoff, only afterwards realizing that I didn't say it was uninteresting.

"We're best mates," he continues. "Who would he rather share with than me?" and he pushes me out into the hallway first to wonder whether this was how he'd been planning my kidnapping to go, or if things had gone wrong in a way that had taken both of us by pleasurable surprise.

By the time I stumble into bed in Slytherin Tower it is late. I fall asleep feeling guilty but wake up in the morning very refreshed.

Classes go by so easily when I'm in a pleasant state of mind. People seem to be nicer to me in a vague way—like there's a warmth in the way they ignore me, if that makes any sense.

While I'm at another Sport Session that is strangely enjoyable a Fragmented letter gets slipped in my shoes, because when I go to put them on a piece of parchment crackles under my foot. I put it into my sleeve and go into the toilet to read it.

Find a way.

Since it's not James' usual scrawl, I can only assume the surprisingly clear if very slanted hand is Sirius'. Is this a trick? Is he doing this to show James I'm not good enough for him? I crumple the note and the dust runs through my fingers. This is a bad thing. I'm going to find James and talk to him.

It turns out to be very hard to talk with him. He must be angry at me and avoiding the person who spent five minutes snogging his best friend. I feel truly wretched. Would a girl have been so ready to betray him? We haven't talked of girls. I don't know if he likes them—or prefers them for that matter. We've scarcely talked about anything, really. He once told me he's an only child and yes, I guess he did say something about Sirius but he didn't say they were old playmates.

I know he's gifted at charms, because the Fragmentus spell is extremely complex, keyed to a personal signature and designed to assemble and then self-destruct the way it is. But as much as I want to know him, I just do know him. I can sense anywhere he's been, and there's this awareness labeled "James" that has been opened in the corner of my mind. I laugh at Gryffindor antics sometimes, because of him!

But he's either not looking my way or someone gets between us when I try to talk to him. My natural isolation is suddenly extremely annoying. The Fragmented notes I pen to him with all manner of awkward romantic declarations don't seem to get to him. With my James-sense I just feel a kind of steady anguish.

And there is something else thrumming at the edge of my mind, a hot green hammer as if Sirius is saying, "Let me in, let me in."

Maybe if the three of us talk this out we can clear the air. I begin looking for a room, but can't really picture the two of them coming into Slytherin House, Invisibility Cloak or not. I have no desire to expose myself on their territory, so we must find somewhere. The storeroom we used once seems to have been sealed off. The broom closet where Sirius accosted me has a broken door handle.

Feeling thoroughly frustrated, I start pacing the hallways the way I used to when I was afraid to dream. It's always calmed me, just me with stone all around. This isn't going well, my first love affair, and James is far, far better than I could have expected for an Incongruent like me. The way he kisses me washes away this lifetime's worth of sadness and then some. I think of losing him, the way I surely will at some point, and then of a long life of tawdry affairs with other men who, like me, are doomed to seek their pleasure from others who, like them, haven't the slightest idea of how to find more than just that.

I scrape my knuckles hard enough against the stone wall to draw blood, welcoming the pain as a way to steel myself against the inevitable blowup with James.

The wall opens.

I go in and the wall closes seamlessly behind me. Inside is a wonderful, inviting room with wall sconces and lots of cushions and tapestries.

And a bed. A bed fit for a giant.

And his mate.

As many mates as he likes.

I look around for the jokester. Surely this is a trap. "Let's get Snape in a big bed and watch him jerk off."

The sconces flicker cheerily at me as I sink into the very comfortable mattress.

Perhaps the castle is on my side, I dare to think. There is parchment on a desk and I put it to good use. When the spell is cast the pieces clump into a ball in my pocket. I walk through the castle and make my way into the empty Great Hall. The Gryffindors always sit in one place. The Fragmented letter should be able to find him from where it's stuck under the table unless the House Elves decide to do a thorough cleaning between now and then.

Sleep comes and with it dreams about sinking forever into a soft, soft bed rolling around with James. I never see his face but it must be him. No one else makes me feel like I'm all liquid, just this delicious potion that's being warmed exactly right so as to reveal some magic I had never suspected in myself.

At breakfast I give my usual close study to my toast, so I don't know if my letter reached its destination. By the middle of the day something is changing in my James-sense, so he must have read it, but I can't tell his reaction.

By dinner I have butterflies in my stomach and don't know if they're his or mine so I make a very careful inventory of the number of peas on my plate. I eat one and it tastes black. The peas are pushed around on my plate until it's safe to gracefully leave.

Out on the astronomy tower I take long breaths of bracing cold air. He's going to break it off with me. I know it. This is the one and only normal person who will get within ten feet of me and he'll be gone after this night.

The thought calms me in a way. I will get through this. Being alone is terrible in a wonderful way, most of the time. I think of Vin living out in the fields and consider that I'll just go to Romania and get my own flock. A flicker of real happiness licks up my chest. I look where I've been pacing while planning my escape to Romania.

My hand presses the door in to the hidden room without my thinking about it.

Two heads whip toward the door.

Hermès Trismégiste, they're both here!

They sit very still as I walk what seems like a mile on shaky legs towards the bed, where they sit fully clothed and with textbooks of all things.

"We're at a study session officially," Sirius says. I'm looking at James. He must be angry at me. But he's just looking at me the way he does when we're alone and he's making me feel wonderful.

I sit next to the boy who feels like a second heart fluttering in my chest. "I missed you," I say, trying to keep my resolve to tell him how I feel.

He makes a little noise in his throat and pulls me by my hair towards him until our mouths meet. I surrender to the kiss and give my best sardonic lilt to my eyebrow in Sirius' direction.

"Are you here for moral support?" I say finally to the curly-haired boy.

James sits back, suddenly passive. The outrageous thought comes to me that they have some sort of—relationship—as well, but that's impossible. Sirius' distaste for the idea of James and me was real enough. Though quickly dispelled….

While these thoughts are running through my head Sirius has been unbuttoning his shirt, apparently. Because the next thing I know a long, lean torso and very muscular arms are gleaming at me in the torchlight. Despite my best efforts to ignore the thought, I want him. My hand twitches forward and he leans closer. My hand clenches. I'm here to save my relationship with James! I look at James desperately. He reaches for my hand. He understands! I don't have to say it; he knows how I feel about him!

James places my hand on Sirius' chest.

I can't resist. The pull of that mile-long torso is too strong. I lick down to the navel and he coos. The new sounds and textures are fascinating. I want to share them with James. I look up. My first lover has been watching me. He meets my gaze the way he does when I know he's fighting off being ashamed.

Sirius is taking off his pants. He's all impatience. I put one hand on both of their shoulders and pull them close until the three of us are mixing our tongues together.

It's more pleasure than anyone has a right to, is the thought echoing in my otherwise blissfully empty head that night.

Our enjoyment was exponential.

But the best was when one of them held me down while the other had his way with me. The one watching was so focused that he acted like a mirror. I could feel everything I was doing with the other boy twice over again in the watcher's mind. It was ecstasy. Any thought that I was an ugly or Incongruent creature was swept away by seeing my body transforming a boy's hard hunger into something unendingly liquid and deep, watching my orgasm and Sirius' burst over James' face. And then It's me and James, softer, slower, flickering across Sirius' volatile features.

That night I saw that I am not my homely Aunt Adele with the misfortune of a homosexually oriented penis. Under Sirius' rough sun-browned hands I am a miracle of white smoothness. What my lips do to James, Sirus' mirror in sympathy. I feel James' admiration of the way my body flows like water around the larger young man, bucks but doesn't break. James whispers some terrible, profane observations in my ear. There is something about that wholesome mouth saying dirty things that is my undoing. I look up and he completes the circuit.

Between the three of us, it was too much magic. That must have been what we were making, because the sconces were leaping up towards the ceiling when we finally exploded together for the last time.

Two fireflies, one orange one greenI lie back against the pillows with one male curved protectively on either side of me. In one part of my mind I am thinking about ways for us to hide this type of relationship for the rest of our lives, wondering if it is legal anywhere in the world. I'll get elected somewhere and make it legal, my mind is saying, but the rest of my mind is happily silent. When I close my eyes I can see their orange and green magics circling around me like fireflies, and the light they give off warms me in a place I had thought would be cold forever.

Finally they stir. "I can sleep anywhere I like," I venture, "but you have both probably been missed already."

The two Gryffindors exchange a shrug. "We've been accused of being too close before," James said.

"But we never were!" Sirius exclaims at my horrified expression. "Don't worry, I think we all want things to stay just the way they are between the three of us."

Of course, the three of us never did get together again. Not without bloodshed, at any rate.

What the rest of the school is doing while I was having my sexual crisis and three-headed first romance, I have no idea. Students are mostly an undifferentiated mass to me. The adults are clearer to me because they had something I wanted—knowledge. Or in the Transfiguration professor's case, the ability to tell me a lesson was over. Madam Lessmore is the clearest to me, but mostly I just live in my head. Now that I have some pleasant things to think about, so much the better, but I've learned not to expect much real interest from people, so I show them little in return.

So when I go to breakfast and feel a little ripple of interest, I think it most peculiar.

Thinking it's because I look unnaturally relaxed, I affix a scowl on my forehead and pluck some toast from the tray. Chewing it, I make the mistake of letting my eyes wander. Some people meet my gaze! This almost never happens. And usually they look away immediately. As an ugly person, I count on it.

I grab a couple more pieces of toast and a hard-boiled egg, and go outside to finish breakfast on the grounds. It's Magical Animals first anyway, which is outside on a nice, if chilly, December day like today. Walking past the pond I crumble a piece of toast for the monstrous turtle that lives in the depths. It pokes its head up and I nod. "Good morning," I say in greeting. It nods back and eats a piece of bread. Some small fish come up to the surface and I make the bread break into bite-size pieces for them. We all smile at each other and then I'm on my way to meet the throng of students gathered at the edge of the forest.

Are they having sex as well? I wonder about my fellow students. For all I know, girls are warding themselves against pregnancy and lots of boys are meeting up in broom closets to do it. Or perhaps they're all as miserably repressed as I was a couple months ago, and likely to object to anyone getting off just out of spite.

When I have an unusually easy time coaxing a falcon out of the sky and getting it to sit on my shoulder, I expect the usual grumbles from the other students who will call me a show off and a know-it-all as usual when it licks my fingers.

They say nothing.

Professor Isle gives me her usual cheeky grin and I hand the bird off to the next student, who only holds it a moment before it squawks and tries to fly away.

"Any advice, Mr. Snape?" asks the teacher.

"Other than buttery fingers from breakfast, no Ma'am," I respond, and the class laughs. They laugh with me, not at me.

Is it possible that receiving so much affection from two perfectly gorgeous boys the night before is enough to thaw the indifference of my classmates? I wonder with flashes of just a few scenes from last night. I'll remember that on my deathbed, I think as class is dismissed and I wander—not too far from the others this time—back towards the school. It still feels almost painfully beautiful in my memory, what James, Sirius and I did the night before.


	9. Chapter 9

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 9: Union

At lunch, people are still taking notice of me, but what I see most of all is that a couple of the staff are paying close attention to my consumption of a sandwich. This, I don't like at all. Since I've been so fortunate to have the run of the school, I forget that I'm basically a ward of Hogwarts and they can rule me however they wish. Considering that I can't be the first boy who liked other boys to come through the doors (though I have put my predilections to creative use) I concentrate on the sandwich in front of me. It doesn't taste terrible, but the taste is blunted in some way. When will they (I have a they!) contact me again, I wonder. Or should I initiate? A smile plays around my lips when someone knocks into me.

"Sorry," says a Gryffindor boy I don't know. When I turn back to my plate, something is wriggling inside my robes. A letter! Which one of them wrote it? Whose idea was it to use someone else to send it?

That night, I meet in "our room" as Sirius so warmly called it in the letter. We're naked as fast as one sixteen-year-old and two seventeen-year-old boys can get, and are sinking into our common pleasure when someone bursts through the door.

"What are you doing here, Robinson?" demands Sirius, drawing a blanket over most of us. It's the boy who gave me the note this morning.

"I wanted to know what you were doing," the other boy says, looking not at all horrified at seeing three young men naked together.

"Well you've seen what we would be doing if you weren't standing in the middle of it talking to us," I snap, but James has the most violent reaction.

"Get out, get out," he says, pummeling the boy Robinson in the chest.

"No, no I won't," he says, taking a step back but not turning to leave.

"What's the harm?" Sirius says suddenly.

"The harm is that you will be doing whatever you do without me," I retort, reaching for my clothes. Are James and Sirius some traveling act after all?

I'm scrutinizing this boy Robinson for signs that he's only pretending to be an intruder when he actually came by invitation, when I see a hard look come over my two partners' faces.

Then I turn my eyes on them, and catch my two lovers exchanging some look laden with secret meaning.

Suddenly, one of them points a wand at Robinson and utters Petrificus, while the other grabs one of the tapestry-ties and binds me, spread-eagled, to the bed.

"So if that's how it is with you, then we're not letting you go, not until you give us what we want," James says. He and Sirius are acting in eerie concert as they take off their clothes and position Robinson so he can watch as they probe into me.

The cords they've used are simply laughable. I could burst free in a few moments using wandless magic on a bad day, and the way I've been feeling recently, I could disintegrate them with a thought. But for some reason, I am incredibly curious to see what they will do next, so I watch them silently.

"Who is it?" Sirius hisses while he acts on me with no tenderness at all. "Who is it you're with when you're not with us? You can't deny you were just considering it with Robinson. You get that look on your face like you're slipping through my fingers."

James realizes that the charm he has cast so that he can shove himself down my throat without fear of being bitten is at cross purposes with obtaining information, and withdraws so he can give me use of my mouth again.

"I want to make you feel what you make me feel," James says in a voice that is both imploring and dangerous. I only have a moment of stupid joy at the idea that he feels something for me, and then he erases it with a backhand across the face. "You're so superior all the time, standing back and watching the effect you have on me, on us," both of their hands twist me painfully. "We'll see how you like it when you hurt in a place you can't reach." Two sets of fingers are scrabbling at me and my mind wonders dumbly what reaction I'm supposed to be having to this display.

Because it is a display. The Petrified boy is flung on a chair with his great interest in the scene reflected southward, but it is his eyes that provide the most accurate reflection of what he would be doing were he not spelled. I don't like the look in his eyes one bit, but before I can consider why, James grabs Sirius and the two writhe in front of me in some mutual torment that is only a bit better if shared. They gaze at what they're doing to my most secret passage using something James has enchanted for that purpose. With a hand on each other's groin they roil and gibber and call me terrible things—

"Look at the bitch loving getting it rough," James sneers.

"I think the little slut likes an audience—I've never heard those sounds come out of those lips before," Sirius licks around my mouth.

—and it is true. I've never felt this level of arousal. Part of my rational mind is observing what is surely an unspeakable Incongruency, but the rest of me is ecstatic that they care for me this much to be so upset at the idea that some part of me has escaped them. As someone who has been touched so little, I feel the scratches and the burns they inflict with their wands as a very intimate kind of desire. The more they curse and scream at me to give them some answering passion I freely gave them when we first got together, the more deeply I feel their own desire for me staining the very tissues in my veins.

"I love you James! I love you, Sirius! Don't stop, be with me like this always!" I implore while bits of blood fly up around us. They've gotten hold of their belts.

They don't seem to hear what I have just said. Then I remember the spell they returned to my throat and they must have heard only submissive grunts.

They are crazed with wanting to make me feel something, but I feel so at one with them I can look through their eyes and catch glimpses of what they see. The creature they shove things into, the body that pulls climax after climax out of them with no relief, only anguish, is a broken, beautiful, tantalizing image.

That, more than the desire they feel for me, is what keeps me in the bonds. I feel myself growing twenty, thirty feet from all the passion they are pouring into me, but it is the image of myself, siren-like, tenderly lovely, cruelly gorgeous, that brings me to a still place I never knew I could reach.

"Filthy bitch!" James is pulling on my hair, but of course he can't do anything to it. His action does register in the very roots of my skull, and I make some moan that frightens me while I do it again and again.

"More," I mouth.

Sirius is punching me all over now, his hair flying around his face. He sees it. I am beautiful. I am whole.

"More," is the shape my mouth makes.

In the end they are so exalted with violent lust that can't seem to be satisfied that they free the other boy and thrust him onto me, into me.

I don't want this. Nobody asked me about this. All the magic that has been loosed in the room is crackling in me so erratically it's making it hard to focus. I'm doing my best to pull the magic from deep inside me without being able to get my hands together. I don't like this boy. He's a stranger and he's grunting like a pig on me and they're seeking their pleasure once again. Finally I find the right place in me and push him out right when he's coming. He spurts on me and I want to retch.

They clean me off with a sheet very gently and I want to scream but they still have my throat enchanted. I wonder if I can undo the spell and suddenly the whole room unfurls itself in a glittering map of magic. Effortlessly I locate the place where the spell is squeezing my throat and it is gone.

"Slaves to novelty?" I ask in a flat voice.

They look startled.

"You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble for me. I'm really of very simple tastes," I say. "So simple, in fact, that whatever sideshow you and James" (the name hurts me) "the two of you have going, I don't want to be a part of it."

They're both nodding. You don't have someone break up with you and then nod. You don't torture someone and force them to unwillingly couple with a stranger and then nod. Are they really so heartless?

Pulling my clothes on, I stalk out of the room with as much dignity as my sore hide will allow.

A quick inventory in a stairwell shows that I look like I've been set upon by particularly sadistic bandits. No one would believe schoolboys could do this level of systematic damage, and I don't want anyone to believe it of my Sirius and my James.

I don't want anyone to know what I've turned them into.

Because it is unquestionable that my revolting Incongruencies have turned these normal, healthy boys into sex-crazed torturers. Because I couldn't have possibly gotten the worst of this evening. A motion of my little finger casts a seamless glamour over my injuries. A mere thought causes the castle to open up a more direct route to my dormitory. I can touch my hand to the ceiling as my feet dance on the walls. I can sense a storm coming hundreds of miles away and I tell it to go somewhere else. My wounds are already healing, sticking to my pajamas, but whatever I have unleashed in them exists on such a terrifyingly primeval level it may never be healed.

The orange-ish firefly I think of as James, and the greenish one I think of as Sirius, I can feel them fluttering together in Gryffindor Tower. Zooming through the magical map I can now see as clear as the lines on my palm, I call them with my body, just once, so they will know how much they have transformed me and that I would never take it back.

I go straight to the Slytherin showers and wash off three boys' fluid and also some blood. And oceans of that blue stuff is that seems to come out of my pores when I'm excited. Why can't anything be normal for me?

I go to sleep for the rest of the night and decide to sleep in the next morning.

It was the last normal sleep I got that term.

The next morning at breakfast people pass me toast and jam without my asking. Over the next few days I think it will stop there because the boys are steadfastly looking somewhere else, but in my classes my quill and scroll are knocked off my desk many times over, and each time there is a young man ready to return them to me with a gallant gesture.

Briefly, I wonder whether there would be a rush to throw their cloaks underfoot should I venture near a mud puddle.

No amount of sarcasm from me seems to do any good. If I were a normal boy, getting all this attention from the gender of my interest would be flattering. But as it is, I can't help but relate it to the other night of perversions galore shared with my two lovers, and my blood runs cold at the idea they are telling people what we get up to.

Robinson! Surely they took the precaution of spelling him into forgetting what he witnessed! Actually, I'm sure that they did so while I was getting dressed, and both my paramours have much to lose from word of our threesome getting out (after all, it's one thing to have a homosexual dalliance as a matter of convenience in a boarding school, but a ménage a trois smacks of a deeper intention).

So how to explain the careful gambits all these males use to get close to me?

If I were as much of a slut as James and Sirius seem to think, I'd be spreading my legs for a revolving group of young men. Instead, I feel terribly conflicted, dirty, and frightened at how difficult it is to restrain myself from seeking out my two chosen lovers for more of the same.

When they kidnap me on the way to see Lessmore one evening, I scarcely put up a fight.

Unfortunately, they don't intend to repeat our one night with just the three of us. James and Sirius have assembled a collection of the young men who have been sniffing around me, and no one needs to be Petrified because they are lining everyone up and shaping the evening's lasciviousness in an orderly fashion. "You, put it here. No, he doesn't bite. You, do this right there. That's right." It's very difficult to think clearly with so many different kinds of magic all around. I know what I am doing is wrong in so many ways, but I want whatever Sirius and James will give me, even if it's a string of strange bodies and recitations of how dirty I am.

"You never spread your legs that wide for me, whore," James is saying to me while two people I don't know are using me. My magic is so strong it flows up the walls and makes the tapestries shimmer. "I love you, James," I say around the alien skin.

This must be what Bigham was talking about when he referred to the "compulsive, self-focused nature of the Incongruent." My magic is so strong that I can uproot a tree just by thinking about it. It's so strong I can smooth out the magical grid and make none of the adults notice what is going on right under their noses. But I simply cannot say no to anything James and Sirius dream up. I want whatever they will give me.

The first unwanted entry into my body, Robinson, becomes the cancer that metastizes through the first boyish happiness of sex. I don't want them. I hate them, these strange boys' bodies. Their smells and their magics pool in my throat and I want to vomit. When I'm alone I will vomit. But I deserve them poking around in the space preserved for my two lovers because Incongruents only want any cock, they don't actually feel for another man. And then when I see how aroused and worshipful James and Sirius get, surveying the other students exploit my passivity, I get aroused despite myself watching the two boys mad with desire over my slatternly ways.

If Bigham were still alive I'd throw my nasty carcass at his feet and beg him to excise all that is feminine, debased and most of all, all that is growing stronger from every black deed.

I scarcely need to sleep anymore. In my boy's bed in Slytherin tower I smooth and smooth the magical grid shimmering around the castle. Mentally I talk to the stones, flatter them, make them purr, so that we can keep using that room that none of the adults know about. I whisper in the ears of my teachers, telling them not to notice that I can jump forty feet in the air, solve complex Arithmantic equations in my head and Transfigure myself into a working muggle automobile. And I hover outside Dumbledore's door, careful not to get too close to the crafty old man's magic, and tell him I am the same ungainly adolescent and there is no reason whatever to think of me as one of the most powerful magical entities for miles.

With my new sensitive hearing I can listen to horny boys masturbating over what they will do to me when they have a chance. "He'll do anything," a knot of students moans together in anticipation while listening to James or Sirius sing my debasement.

It is right before the end of the term, and the traditional full-dress dance is scheduled. In my stupid, giddy lovesick girl's brain, I've spent the time while healing my nightly wounds imagining some absurd vision that alternates between James and Sirius waltzing with me, burying their face in my hair hanging loose, kissing me reverently, the three of us dance together, not caring who knows—

In the end, it was the unusual number of girls sobbing because no one had invited them to the dance that tipped off Dumbledore.

Hermès! The only thing that could have been worse than that humiliating fall from grace would have been being stampeded by all the lovesick males of Hogwarts, demanding a dance!

It happens at dinner, a few nights before the dance. One girl gets up from dinner crying, then another and another. It's only seven or so girls, which really isn't too different than previous fancy dress balls, but it's enough to wake up Dumbledore. He starts in his seat at the head of the table, looking around the Great Hall, taking in something only he can see in the boys' faces, and then he looks at me for the first time in years.

The magic seething at the far end of the table from him as I quietly sip my soup seems to unnerve him, and he all but shrinks away from me.

Then he looks at James.

If I'd known he looked like that I would have done something about it!

In a moment, Dumbledore is at James's side and leading the boy out of the Great Hall. No one seems to grasp what is happening besides Sirius, but even so, I only have eyes for the shrunken slip of a young man who bears a passing resemblance to my James.

The pale, haunted face, the great bruises around his eyes that search for mine while he is led away, they will become a fixture in my nightmares.

I don't know what's happened, but I know in my bones that it's my fault.

Feeling like a monster, I quietly finish my dinner and go out into the frigid night. My magic is so strong, I'm not cold. This is the shattering of my happiness that I've been expecting all this time. Knowing James is lost to me forever, that I have hurt him in some unspeakable way, I throw myself into the lake and will my muscles not to struggle.

The lake's monstrous turtle drags my unconscious form to the front door and accepts an apple for his trouble.

I wake up in the Infirmary, wishing more than anything not to be looking into Lessmore's eyes wearing That Look.

Strangely, I bear no ill effects from being in freezing water, but something hurts deep inside of me, a throbbing, personal kind of pain I must deserve. Rose-Croix! They must have done something unspeakable to my body last night, I think fondly of my two lovers. I try to roll on my back and wince. Then the whole nightmare comes flooding back.

They've given me something to mend my torn tissues, and I gag thinking of what events they must have pieced together leading to these injuries.

My body feels empty. I search through the magic of the school and don't feel James or Sirius or, thankfully, any of the Babel of voices and magics that has been increasingly crowding my head. But my two friends—were they friends? Then I remembered James was sick. I focus my awareness over the infirmary. No James. But there is—

"Good morning, Severus," said Dumbledore. "Don't worry. You will heal."

That was something less than a resounding "you will be fine," I note, and am about to tell him so, when he holds up a hand.

"You deserve an explanation, Severus. You are almost a man, and have done marvelously in a very difficult situation here at school. I should have known that everyone is bound to seek love eventually."

A sour feeling comes over me. If this is all about my inclinations… "So what if I'm an Incongruent!" I burst out, "I can't be the first to be with a boy!'

"Oh, but you are the first of your kind in recent memory," says Dumbledore gently. "Perhaps if there were better records of how similar cases have been handled, we wouldn't have had to experience this tragedy."

"James didn't feel it was a tragedy when we were together," I all but shout. "What is the matter with you people—"

Dumbledore is giving me That Look again, the one that makes me itch. "Why do you all look at me that way?" I finally say.

"Like what?" he says, giving me That Look in spades.

"Like something is terribly wrong with me and I'll never be happy but you can't bear to tell me so," I say.

The headmaster sighs. "How much do you know about magical signatures?" he asks.

"Sort of like human Spagyrics," I say.

"Very well said, and yet, you are so gifted with compounds and potions but have such a hard time with people. Why is that?"

"Not with all people," I say defensively. "The people who actually talk with me, we seem to get along all right."

"I think it goes a little better than all right," he says quietly. "You see that stone on the far wall? The one with the white vein to it? Bring it here, please."

There is the black taste of my fate in my throat, and all he wants to do is be cryptic! I rage at him mentally, depositing the wall stone on the floor at his feet with the power of my mind.

"Tell me the sweet that is in my left pocket," he says.

I clench my hands impatiently. "Ginger Gum," I answer, trying not to snap.

"Would you have been able to do these things a few months ago?" he inquires.

"Hang the magic—all I care about is James," I lash out, mentally apologizing to Sirius. There are some things I'd like not to discuss with a centenarian. "Where is he?"

Dumbledore looks straight into my eyes. "He will probably live."

"Probably?" The word swirls around in my mind like a poison fish. It nibbles delightedly at all my pleasures and plans from the last two months and watches me drown in the black, black melancholy that is my eternal lot from killing my mother. How could I have ever forgotten?

I look up at him a changed young man. "I almost killed someone else?" All of the bright, mixed energies that have been running like wine in my veins suddenly seem like intruders. It's itchy, it's alien. I scratch at the magic in my arms, the magic I suddenly realize I've stolen from half the school.

The old man just watches me.

"Good of you to intervene before I killed him like I suppose I killed my mother!" I snap, everything about my childhood falling into place. "Why did you let a monster into your school, knowing I would go after the first pretty boy that gave me the opportunity?"

He's shaking his head. "You're confused, Severus. There is something about you that gives me pause, but it is not your liking for your own sex. You are an Alkahest."

"A what?" I'm searching my memory for any anti-homosexual slur that sounds like this.

"A universal solvent in human form. Your magic is to bond with others' magic and make it your own. The ability to sense different flavors of magical energy, as it were, makes you an unparalleled potions adept, but unfortunately it doesn't stop there."

He seems to have to force himself to meet my rapt attention.

"'With James and the other boys, the sexual contact quite naturally opened you to each other, but in your case, this 'wound' if you can call intimacy a wound, never clots. It is an opening that lets you into the very source of their magic, and each further contact funnels more of this magic into you, not because you want it to" he emphasizes "but because your organism—just like anyone else's heart—has the urge to become one with another. Sadly, what should be a great gift—the ability to attain union with someone—is for you a deadly affair."

My next words seem to surprise him because they are not about boys at all.

"And my mother, when she bore me—"

"We have no records to go on, and your family has never wished to have any contact with the school," Dumbledore's disdain is apparent. "We have no way of knowing if her illness started with your conception, or if the deterioration happened as a consequence of you using magic as part of your growth as a magical being in your own right."

The symbol of my childhood, which I had always attributed to my mother's illness, flashes before my eyes. "I made the house break apart?"

"Perhaps." He takes a deep breath, suddenly seeming very old and tired. "Severus, this cannot happen again. You mustn't so much as touch another magical person. Maybe a muggle would be safe, but given how poorly you got on with your father, perhaps there is a dynamic at work there as well."

Suddenly I am aware of how grievously my body has been mistreated. I am ashamed. I want to cry. It doesn't matter. No one will ever touch me again.

"When I heard about you, a young boy of ten doing all those complicated potions, and at the same time in such great need of understanding, how could I refuse you early entrance?" he says, spreading his hands. "But I did have to take precautions, such as warding the castle. It understood you a little too well, however, and opened the Room of Requirement to you after I expressly told it to close all areas but the infirmary to you after hours.

"You made the broom closet disappear!"

"An instruction that I embedded in the stone, should it become necessary, did, yes," he admits.

I can't believe we're obliquely talking about trysts in the cupboard, I think.

"And then there were the other students," he begins.

"So they don't just ignore me because I'm ugly," I interject.

He laughs without mirth. "Severus, you have not looked in the mirror recently. Beauty has far more to do with presence than with physiology, though you are not unfavored in that regard either."

"I don't look in the mirror anymore. I just see my Aunt Adele," I admit for the first time to anyone.

"Well, that explains a few things. When other people see you, they see—everything they can ever want. Avoiding touching people is important, and the wards help, but certainly someone you really open yourself to is likely to find you dangerously irresistible."

"Anyone who touches me?"

"Maybe not the slightest touch, but someone of magical inclination should be careful, certainly,"

I think of Madam Lessmore's strange ambivalence about having me around, and how she has never once hugged me back.

I've been living my life in quarantine without knowing it.

"That's why the professors all treat me like an oddity," I say, slumping back into the pillows.

"They all knew about the situation, for their own safety," Dumbledore agrees. "But you were er, very talented at keeping your distance from the other students, so I thought we would be fine having you here as long as you wanted to stay."

"You never counted upon me meeting someone," I say, defensive, as all creatures of their right to be loved.

"Oh, yes, I thought about that happenstance more than you would be comfortable to know, but I had my attentions in the wrong direction," he pauses and I picture him warding the girls' dormitories like mad.

"Luckily I had some general spells making a sort of moat around you, which must have kept James away from you for a long time. How did he get around it, by the way?"

I describe meeting up in the tower and our first encounter under the invisibility cloak.

"Of course!" he exclaims as if he talks about his students' homosexual affairs every day. "You were in close proximity and he saw your unguarded expression."

"And after that you kept us apart," I accuse.

"There was simply a powerful ward up protecting you from all contact with anyone," the wizard protests. "The fact that he ever got through at all was sheer dumb luck."

We look at each other for a long moment, me, drowning in a fate I still don't understand, him, watching me drown and having the grace not to pretend it's possible to save me.

"You must never have intimate contact with another boy, Severus. If the physical contact doesn't overwhelm him he runs the risk of psychic deterioration."

Like my mother.

I stare at him, something in my confused brain clicking at last.

"What do you mean 'never?'"

"I mean perhaps you should find a nice muggle chap," says Dumbledore firmly. "And even so, you may not be safe because of your great power. But you will not find a wizard who can withstand the deadly pull of your magic. And you will certainly not look for such a fellow here at Hogwarts. Do I have your word that you will avoid any such situation with the boys here?" His magic rears up, huge and sharp, in a way I've never experienced it before. Dumbledore is frightening like this.

He's commanding me. My for-all-intents-and-purposes guardian has commanded me to not look for love at Hogwarts. What can I do but agree?

"Yes, sir," I say, my also-huge magic bowing before his. The idea of wandering around muggle settlements for the rest of my life, looking for a similarly inclined man who is just as incomprehensible as my father, fills me with dread.

"Well then," he's regained his cheerful tone. I half expect him to give me a sweetie to take the edge off my black fate. "Do you have any more questions for me?"

"Just one," I force myself to ask: "How is James?"

"James is at home, resting," Dumbledore replies. "He will be all right, but you must promise to have nothing further to do with him. Though he may ask you to, you must refuse. Do you understand?" I nod, swallowing thickly. "See here," Dumbledore produces a bright, pure flame at the end of his wand. "This is James' normal level of magic. He's very gifted with complicated charms. He must be to have bypassed the wards surrounding you." He makes a movement and the flame looks much smaller, thin and sickly. "This is probably how his magic looks now. It was worse earlier, but he's on the mend."

"I did that?" I ask, staring at the meager fire.

"It is beyond your will," Dumbledore affirms and waves the fire away. "You do understand that, don't you? I've been telling you ever since you first came. It is not your fault, nor can you change the way you are. You simply must live with certain precautions…"

"For the rest of my life," I finish.

Doors are shutting one after the other inside me. Hopes opened up by James are being packed away somewhere safe, never to be opened again.

By the time I've shut the last door my face is calm. "You can count on me, Headmaster," I say. "I know how to be an unapproachable bastard."

They let me take some exams late so I have two days to rest—actually I heal very quickly, what with all the magic I've been gobbling down along with the cock—but I need a couple days to get into character so I can make a showing before the term's end. It's not that I was ever cordial before, but I also wasn't outed as a boy-loving freak either.

During those two days I bury a lot of things—the hope everyone has for a true love, my childhood warped by madness, my relationship with James, and my mother. Her I bury all over again, and I cry for a long time in a secret grove in the Forbidden Forest. A falcon comes down and sits on me for a while and I relish the closeness. Animals are apparently immune to me. For the first time, I began thinking about acquiring a pet.

I'll be one of "those" wizards who talks to his familiar, and I'm only 16!

"I wish I could tell James what I never got to tell him," I whisper. The falcon tilts his head and licks my fingers. They're not covered with butter. Maybe another of my oddities is that I'm strangely delicious to the animal kingdom.

I shake it off and get up. For the rest of my life, I'm never going to know if anyone or anything likes me—me—or just likes how I make them feel.

It's horrible, those few days before the end of the term.

Since Dumbledore and I agreed it would not be possible to do a memory charm on the entire school, I just have to man up and take the stares and the jeers, none of which are more venomous than those from the boys who had me. A breath seems to follow me wherever I go, "Queeeeer." "Cockkkksuckkker." Yet it happens just as the great wizard said it would—the truth quickly becomes distorted by what is easier for people to believe.

The Gryffindors manage to convince themselves that I had seduced James, either by potions or some other dark kind of magic. The other participants in this sordid affair seem to have collective amnesia.

Apparently no one knows or cares to know that Sirius was an integral part of James and me. Sirius is very vigorous and thus seems to not pay much of a price for our contact, until I find out later that he takes vitamin shots for the rest of the time he's at school and uses a booster in his wand to make up for his diminished power. It must have wounded him very deeply to see himself marked by me so he seeks to hide it—he swaggers a lot more and carries on publicly with girls to compensate, it seems to me.

My house closes ranks for me, and I must say, I am very grateful to have a little show of solidarity at first. The whole Slytherin thing always seemed rather a joke to me, but they are fantastic while the rest of the school treats me like I have the Scrofulus Fugue. It's impossible to truly get to know any of them, of course, but I almost wish I could have. Not that they seem interesting, but you never know when you can use a friend who doesn't bat an eye about you almost killing someone by magical-sexual chemistry gone wrong.

Then there is Christmas break, and when I tell the headmaster I will be going to Ireland, he doesn't ask what I will do there. I do nothing, actually, for much of the time. Last summer I had located all the good places for magical fungi and insects, so I collect some, send them off by owl to the potions manufacturer I contract with every year during holidays, and then there is nothing left to do. I mostly lie there in a rustic inn and let my fate crowd around me like rats around a freezing man.

I get drunk for the first time in my life, or rather, discover that I cannot get drunk. Yet another way that my infirmity denies me basic pleasures. The pub owner keeps serving me pint after pint and when I switch to spirits he figures it's some kind of trick. People lay bets, and I desperately try to forget all the things I don't want to think about, which merely take on a resinous quality after 12 drinks. My steady hand pushes the thirteenth from me like the proof of my damnation that it is.

"What's tha matta, finally had enough, didya," some rough-looking man says in a rougher Brogue.

My defenses are down enough that I don't shield him from some awful look summarizing my private hell.

"He lef', then?" the man says in a jokester's deadpan.

"Pardon?" I say, magic building between my hands to shut him up. I'm having trouble remembering why I need to restrain myself around muggles—they're immune to my curse yet they mustn't know about magic, I rehearse to myself.

"Your true love, he lef'," the man says, echoed now by jests from the rest of the establishment. "I know it wasn't a woman who broke your heart, coz you'd sure make a nice lady in the dark!"

I look at him, drinking in the age-old jeers that my kind (one of my kinds) has been cursed with since the beginning of time. This does finally intoxicate me. I want them to laugh at me. I want them to run me through with a pitchfork or burn me at the stake.

Just as suddenly, the moment is over and the man returns to his avocation of drinking as much as he physically can.

This is the first time one of my life-axioms is shown to be true: that it takes a very, very special person to raise a hand, word or a curse at you, once they know you desperately want them to.


	10. Chapter 10

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 10: The Restricted Section

With two weeks left in the holiday I return to Hogwarts. It's always been my understanding that everyone is to find somewhere else to be because the school frowns on taking charge of students at a time when all the faculty is off traveling or otherwise taking a break from child-minding.

But it occurs to me in Ireland that now that Hogwarts (or Dumbledore, which amounts to the same thing) has taken charge of a monster, they can't very well get rid of me. It's better for everyone if there's someone to keep an eye on me. And the main thought that occurs to me as I lay in bed, condemned to near-total wakefulness because of all the magic I stole, was that I'm terrified of my unknown capabilities.

This True Face that I cannot see becomes all the worse for having no definite boundaries with the physical face I also cannot see. I memorize the feel of my features with my hands but can make no sense of them. Now I hope they're ugly—it would be terrible if I were actually attractive and easy to get along with. People would be nearly impossible to keep away and they'd tear me to bits, as the group of boys seemed about to do at points.

I stare and stare at the mirror, and thus, Aunt Adele. It seems as though that first dream about her, the one that marked the onset of my delayed puberty, holds some kind of key to who I am. In the dream I felt as though she was everything I ever wanted, but that can't be her True Face, because I hated her at the same time, the way I always have. She made me vomit, and that's not what I made James or any of the other boys feel. Finally I am compelled to run out of the muggle inn to get away from it, from Aunt Adele's accusing eyes.

So I return to the only home I have, and the big stone castle lets me in. With my new sense I can tell there are some magical signatures wandering around, including the great man himself, Dumbledore, but none of their possible objections concerns me right now.

Miss Bundle looks up from her book and then continues reading. We've been existing in each other's orbit for years—or rather, I've existed in hers, as the library is her undisputed Lessmore isn't around, Miss Bundle has been the adult technically looking out for me, but I've mainly benefited from her complete disinterest during my long hours in the library. My time used to be spent doing lessons or looking up the obscure potions treatises that are my real interest.

Until last semester, that is, when I began spending extended periods of time in the Restricted Section. The odd thing about this section is that what is really restricted is others' ability to look in and track your activities, rather than any restrictions upon the reader himself. One's privacy appears to be absolute in this one area of the school. There are no prying paintings, no inquisitive instructors. Just shelf upon shelf of books so dangerous or scandalous that you wouldn't be caught dead looking at them otherwise. And apparently you won't be, because no one said a word about my anguished hours cozied up with Bigham's Book.

On this occasion, my urgent errand does not take me to a Restricted book at all, but to the books in a section that I frequent, though to slightly different volumes. I read for two hours or so, with my traveling satchel still by my side. Finally, I get up and approach the desk where the librarian is holding a book very close to her enormous spectacles that dwarf her face. Her long, yellowed-white hair is in a thick braid down her back, like always, and also as usual, she appears to have to think a moment to place my face.

"What is it?" she says with neither kindliness nor annoyance.

"Do you, er, have another translation of this?"

"What's wrong with this one?"

"Well, I've heard so much about Paracelsus I think of him as a sort of uncle. And I use his science every day. But—"

"But what?"

"But I can't make heads nor tails of this." I slide the volume in front of her and she peers down at the page I've been reading for the last half-hour.

"In nature we find a light that illumines us more than the sun and the moon. For it is so ordered that we see but half of man and all the other creatures, and therefore must explore them further….. And if we follow the light of nature, we learn that there exists another half of man, and that man does not consist of blood and flesh alone . . . but also of a body that cannot be discerned by our crude eyesight…. "

Miss Bundle turns her poor eyesight on me. "There's nothing whatever wrong with this translation." She reads aloud:

"Know that our world and everything we see in its compass and everything we can touch constitute only one half of the cosmos. The world we do not see is equal to ours in weight and measure, in nature and properties. From this it follows that there exists another half of man in which this invisible world operates. If we know of the two worlds, we realize that both halves are needed to constitute the whole man; for they are like two men united in one body…."

"But what does that mean?" I burst out, my desperation making my voice crack. She summons another volume, and another.

"Look, they all say the same thing," she says, jabbing at identical places in the German and Latin versions. They all say:

"For man is more than nature; he is nature, but he is also a spirit, he is also an angel, and he has the properties of all three."

"The Great Physick isn't the same charlatan that wrote all this nonsense!" I cry.

"Oh no? He was called worse than that in his day."

"No! He's responsible for half of the magical concepts that make my potions work. My mother called him L'Hermes allemand."

Miss Bundle cackles for the first time in all the years I've known her. "He would've liked that. As a matter of fact Paracelsus probably coined the expression himself."

Latin showed up more often in Aunt Adele's soup of languages, but I have heard German, and I've noticed that as long as I have heard the sound of a language I can sound it out in my head very well. Each of the three books says the same thing:

"He is enclosed in a skin, to the end that his blood, his flesh, and everything he is as a man may not become mixed with that Great World. . . . For one would destroy the other. Therefore man has a skin; it delimits the shape of the human body, and through it he can distinguish the two worlds from each other—the Great World and the Little World, the macrocosm and man—and can keep separate that which must not mingle. Thus the Great World remains completely undisturbed in its husk. . . and similarly man in his house, that is to say, his skin. Nothing can penetrate into him, and nothing that is in him can issue outside of him, but everything remains in its place."

Miss Bundle is looking at me with no expression at all. She puts an ancient French version under my nose and I read with my first language, the one that cannot lie to me:

"How marvelously man is made and formed if one penetrates into his true nature. The outer and the inner are one thing, one constellation, one influence, one concordance, one duration . . . one fruit. For this is the limbus, the primordial matter which contains all creatures in germ, just as man is contained in the limbus of his parents. The limbus of Adam was heaven and earth, water and air; and thus man remains like the limbus, he too contains heaven and earth, water and air; indeed, he is nothing but these."

Her large eyes reflect a terrible sight: a starving man who sees a meal dangling just out of his reach.

"Doubtless you have heard that your 'Great Physick' was responsible for the word bombast because his rather abrasive personality became summed up in one of his names, Bombast. It's apocryphal, of course, the word predates his birth, but scholars did coin a word after another of his names." Her eyes glitter at me through the glass.

"Oh yes?" I say politely, because the words are worrying at me again:

Since nothing is so secret or hidden that it cannot be revealed, everything depends on the discovery of those things which manifest the hidden. . . . The nature of each man's soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. The same is true of the face, which is shaped and formed according to the content of his mind and soul, and the same is again true of the proportions of the human body. For the sculptor of Nature is so artful that he does not mold the soul to fit the form, but the form to fit the soul; in other words, the shape of a man is formed in accordance with the manner of his heart. . . "

"Yes, in learned circles a 'theophrast' is someone who is overly obscure, and perhaps it's not worth it to figure out what he means."

I push the books away. "Theophrastus is my third name," I say stiffly.

A silence.

Miss Bundle is peering at me, and I think it's to ascertain how much she has offended me, but she asks suddenly, "How many names do you have?"

"Six," I reply, not sure what that could possibly matter to her.

"Only six?" She seems disappointed. "I had you for ten or eleven, easy." She looks around and makes a movement with her wand, then she leans closer. "One of my pastimes is to try and guess how many names the pure bloods, or in some cases, the half-bloods, have. The Old Families, at any rate. The most we've ever had in my tenure was a student with 23 names. That's when I instituted the practice of having students design their own name-sigil for tracking their library books and anything else they would have reason to sign here at Hogwarts. Otherwise some of you would do nothing else but write your names."

Is this woman mad? I suddenly think. I've just been outed as a deviant, and as a faculty member she's known me to be a freak of nature for years. All of which should make her realize this is not the moment for little scholarly anecdotes. When I started school at Hogwarts I chose a terse "Snape" as my signature and never thought about it since. "Why are these texts so obscure?" I demand. "There are things I need to know! You knew all along! Tell me about this cursed condition; why am I this way?"

"You're probably starting in the right place, but I might be able to get some rarer volumes for you from my contacts," the word glimmers with some unknown import, but what concerns me is her complete lack of surprise.

"Why didn't you tell me this months ago? I go to the library every day. I've practically lived in the Restricted Section at times."

"It was the Headmaster's view that an intelligent boy like you would probably find what little there was about your condition on his own when he was ready, and then probably teach us more besides. And honestly, Mr. Snape, you came out so upset from that section every time I thought that's what you were reading about."

My cheeks burn.

"And there is so little we know about you, so little that has come through the ages, that it won't be any more edifying or uplifting than what you were obviously reading about instead," she says matter-of-factly.

My eyes search her face for judgment and find none. Over time I will learn that Miss Bundle will never make me feel ashamed of the pursuit of any knowledge. All knowledge is sacred to her, and this cosmopolitan attitude is exactly what I need, but what I need more urgently is someone to vent my rage at.

"So you couldn't have dropped a hint, placed some treatise on my study table, dropped a note in my pocket that said, 'By the way, Snape, you're an Alakahest'?"

Now outrage spreads across her face. "I would do no such thing—I've taken an Oath!"

"What sort of Oath?" I scoff. The students all think the librarian is something close to a squib. Other than fetching and stacking books, we never see her use her wand for any spell of note.

She makes a yelp of fury that startles me and I see a furious swishing of her wand. "You see, right here, and here, it says that the Initiates into the Great Quest for Knowledge must always respect the path of another," She summons a whole pile of dusty scrolls and unfurls them right in front of my face. "'And never coerce or attempt to divert the seeker from his or her search for wisdom, which is propelled by a mechanism known only to his inner compass, which—'"

"Hang on," Not bothering with any niceties, I use my hand magic and intone a charm I know. One of the old parchments changes from an unfamiliar alphabet to the Roman characters that signify sounds in my mind. This is one of Aunt Adele's frequent languages, and I sound it out. "That says 'never stand in the way of a wild she-boar and her young, or she'll make you regret it.'"

I'm able to decode enough of some of the other documents to realize that the librarian is wildly misappropriating their true sense for her own purposes. "Does this trick actually work on people?"

"Yes, every time," she snaps, and then her expression changes. "Where did you learn Ancient Chaldean?"

"It doesn't matter. What matters is that you could have helped me all this time and you didn't."

Miss Bundle sighs and summons a house elf for some tea and sandwiches. Until the food is in front of me I didn't realize how ravenous I was. Once two sandwiches are in my belly, my mind can return to other hungers.

"If you'd only asked me, I could have made the same offer as I did tonight—let me ask around to see if there's not better information through other channels. It really is the belief of all scholars that it is wrong to foist any knowledge upon someone until he or she is ready to ask."

"So do you mean if he was standing right here and I asked the Great Man Dumbledore he would have told me what I am and how to fix it?"

"With that one, perhaps not."

"But that's not fair; it's just stupid!" The child that is still left in me and the young man getting an intuition of a life full of injustices stretching ahead both agree on this. "Everything would be better in the world if people would share what they knew instead of hoarding their knowledge."

Miss Bundle sits placidly behind her stacks and stacks of books. "If there were a lotion to make people absorb knowledge through their skin, why not spread it everywhere so people will be wiser?"

"Because that would be madness! They might absorb each other's thoughts, or dangerous ideas without context!"

She fixes me with her brown eyes. "And so there is such a lotion?"

My mind on my own fate, I say offhandedly, "Perhaps." In my experience nearly anything is possible.

"Make it for me!" She's halfway across the table and about to grasp my arm before I propel myself backwards with all my might.

Her eyes are huge, drinking me in, seeing deep into me. "I just want to know, I could read while I sleep! You have to do this for me!"

"No! Don't look! Don't look at my True Face!" I shout, throwing up every ward I know with my wand hand while my other hand covers this shameful, dangerous visage.

She's laughing. It's that laugh, it's the way James and Sirius and all the boys laughed when they saw me naked. Now I know it to be the laugh of delusion, the sound a person's desire makes when it fixes on the object it is determined to have. The prospect of what Dumbledore will do to me for having inadvertently shown my Face to a faculty member has me rooted, trembling, to the spot.

Miss Bundle's laugh changes into the much more comfortable laugh of derision I'm accustomed to. "Mr. Snape, there are few things I wouldn't do for knowledge, but I'm afraid you're one of them."

My jaw drops at the baldly sexual statement coming from a woman we'd all thought of as ancient. Then it drops lower when I realize:

The librarian is probably not yet thirty.

The hair I'd taken for granted as a yellowed white is actually a rare and lovely shade of strawberry blond, what had always seemed like age spots are actually freckles, and her poor eyesight is obviously a lifelong condition, and not the result of decades of reading small print, though that probably doesn't help.

Physically speaking, she is actually very attractive, or would be if something in the center of her weren't marring it with a hunger that makes her limbs and skin seem wasted when they are nothing of the sort.

With her strange calm she's watching the ideas come together in my head. "I hide it well, but your attitude isn't exactly come hither, either, is it, Snape?" My head is trying to process how to relate to this new, younger, casual Miss Bundle, at the same time that it seeks to understand what is wrong with her. "But in a certain light we do all right."

That's it. That's her take on my condition, and whatever her situation is. There's no horror, maybe a rueful complicity at the most.

She takes a flask out of one of her paper-stuffed drawers and pours a little in our teacups. Knowing now that such an easy release as alcohol is denied me, I drink my own and watch the knot of hunger in the young woman across from me. It's not diminished in the slightest by the bit of spirit, so her problem can't be with drink.

"Make it for me and I'll get you any book you can think of," she resumes. I suddenly realize I'm making my first illicit deal, though I can't yet understand what rule I'm breaking. The idea of using my potions ability—which is somehow a fruit of my illness, I'm beginning to think—for something unsanctioned seems just right.

And so Miss Bundle and I begin a mutually profitable relationship. That night I go to sleep for more than just a few minutes at a time for the first time since my fall from grace. I dream of the solution to the potion assignment the young woman has given me. The next morning I'm in the library very early but the librarian has beat me to it and has breakfast waiting for me alongside a stack of potions references she thinks might be helpful. While I gather some clues from these books, she's drafting owl posts to her contacts in what I will begin to understand is the book underworld.

It takes me over a week to come up with something that seems a plausible solution. When I finally hand over the jar, Miss Bundle reveals the stack of ancient volumes she's been keeping from me.

"These have been arriving since Thursday, but I didn't want you distracted," she says slyly. "Now give it here or I'll reach over and take it myself."

What on earth could be worth exposing herself to whatever toxin I carry in my skin? We float each other's reward across the table that she spends most of her waking hours attached to, and she bolts off.

Her wand warns her just in time about a pile of books she has left near the Restricted Section.

It's the first time I notice that when she moves, the librarian isn't moving her wand subtly as a way of checking that the volumes are in order, or a method of letting students know that she's ready to smite them for carving into the tables.

She really is that nearsighted. I look around the library. It's always been very orderly, as one would expect a magical library to be. Most of the books know their places and will leap back there when you're done with them. Even her constant search for the perfect indexing system, which means we'll often come in to find a familiar section in a different place, or books ordered by era rather than discipline, never has her leaving books on the floor.

But in recent months, things have been a little less tidy, I realize, and move to where the out-of-place volumes could trip Miss Bundle if she is distracted. Perhaps this carelessness means her condition is progressing in some way—why did I offer to add more fuel to the fire that is eating this young woman into a state that makes her look at least 60? My own short-sightedness knows no bounds. How I could have never noticed her compensating for such a vision impairment, or for her unnatural avidity towards books, I have no idea.

Summoning up the books, which lie in pairs or in larger stacks in a path to the Restricted Section, I direct them to a table and then look them over while my mind returns to the mystery of my nature. Then something catches my eye.

These books are all biographies, to a one. That's a coincidence. It's not a genre favored by most students, so they'd not be likely waiting for shelving. After flipping through each of them I realize what they have in common:

They're the life stories of same-sex loving wizards and witches, portrayed in a positive light. She's been leaving these right in my path for months, at hazard to herself and in defiance of her oath. But I've been making a beeline for Bigham's Book and all that associated filth every time, so I didn't see what this not-unkind woman was trying to show me about myself.

This sends me right over to the pile of books the librarian ordered for me.

I read all through the night. At one point it strikes me that Dumbledore and I are the only ones awake. He's surely known since I was at the castle gates that I was back early, and I know enough now to be sure that if he hasn't taken me to task for coming back early, it's not because I'm especially welcome.

He knows what I'm doing right now. He's going to make it his business to know every breath I take for the rest of the time I'm at Hogwarts.

At least here I know I won't drain anyone to death.

When Miss Bundle appears in the morning she practically floats over to me.

"You're a genius!" she says, pinching the air a few inches from my cheek. "And now maybe I will be too."

"You slept well," I ask cautiously. This compound I gave her is purely experimental, but it does contain something to encourage sleep, an activity I expect she engages in all too little.

"Oh, yes," she stretches sensually and then rubs a shoulder. She retrieves a stack of volumes from her pocket and resizes them. "This one is a bit sharp, but I suppose some of the most interesting ones will be," she says, fingering the edge on a thick tome devoted to human-friendly recipes from the goblin hordes. "Perhaps I should make an effort to sleep on books that are roughly the same thickness next time."

Humming, she sends the books back to the shelves for some unsuspecting student to clasp, unaware that they once served as the librarian's bedthings. I stare at her but she has absolutely no shame about this activity I am coming to realize is somehow shameful. Then I put my finger on it: her hunger is much calmer.

That's what I try to tell myself in the coming months as she tells me about her new double-layer method (she opens books on top of her as well as the ones below her). The whole thing was just a lark for me, but when Miss Bundle starts to scare me with her ever-expanding selections of reading (by her own admission she only read seven or eight languages fluently without some sort of charm before, and now I regularly see languages I don't recognize on her desk.) She also recommends some texts that she thinks might be of some use in my research, and I take them gingerly, feeling them to be thick with her magic, which is a lavender color.

It's easy for me to trace either her magic or my lotion throughout the library, but for some reason my abilities can't trace anything that goes on in the Restricted Section. It's completely off the grid.

During our long hours in the library together over break, Miss Bundle admits that it was she who created this private section where almost all the books worth reading, in my opinion, are kept.

Before her tenure, all the library's assets were on the main indexing system and those who checked them out were monitored. Since Hogwarts owns many priceless antiquities, it doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd want to know who to blame if one were to go missing.

"So what happens if someone steals or defaces a book in the Restricted Section? It just seems very un-Hogwarts to allow such an anarchic place to exist."

Miss Bundle says with great dignity, "I told the headmaster that only a barbarous people would police intellectual activity."

"You called Dumbledore a barbarous people?" I gape at her.

She bites her lip. "He didn't say he felt so alluded, but you see the result."

As I get to know Miss Bundle better, however, I wonder if the great man's meddling hasn't gotten the last word after all. Because Miss Bundle is a driven woman, and I suspect she is not the first person kept at Hogwarts because they need someone keeping an eye on them.

She just wants to know.

Everything.

At any cost.

Anyone who will do anything at any cost is a potential danger to society. And certainly to herself. This is my first introduction to addicts but the books about addiction I read in the Restricted Section help me recognize the signs in Miss Bundle. The same signs I find in later years as I come into contact with those wishing to benefit from my unsurpassed ability with making marginally legal substances that have purely illegal effects on the system.

These books about rare paraphilias show me that there are many ways for a witch or wizard to go wrong, not just my own anomalies. Morbid bibliophilia is the name for Miss Bundle's problem, and people of her bent have been known to perish in the search for long-vanished texts about which some unscrupulous person has ignited the hope that they might still exist, the secret to which they will share—always for a fee. They've been apprehended robbing private libraries and gotten buried alive trying to dig into an unexcavated Egyptian tomb, hungering to be the first eyes in a thousand years to alight on the hieroglyphs.

They're not unlike gamblers in the sense that they'll sell their first-born for the sake of indulging their habits, and more than one bibliophile has been found naked, happy and nearly starved in a house stuffed to the brim with books, with only the strongest spells serving to unclasp their hands from the treasures they want to take with them to the asylum, a fate to which they are otherwise indifferent.

I start observing Miss Bundle more closely, taking advantage of the odd frankness about this woman who is completely unintimidated by my own problems. Her attitude is strange. At once, she'll do anything for me, call on any resource, magical or muggle, to find obscure treatises. Sometimes she hints at knowing where the lost library of Alexandria is. This young woman who is aged beyond her years by something feels more relaxed by my collusion with her tastes, and begins to tell me about the vast network of learned people without scruples who plunder, steal, and will kill each other for an unblemished copy of a manuscript from Demosthenes. And they will do worse if sold a forgery as the real thing.

The idea of sharing their great knowledge beyond their small circle doesn't seem to matter to these people at all. Miss Bundle, I begin to grasp, knows more than anyone at Hogwarts put together, more than most people in the wizarding society, but she probably wouldn't lift her nose out of a book to use any of this knowledge, though it might do a great deal of good.

Perhaps it's a lack of imagination. More likely it's that she's addicted to the chase of the next new idea. I'm lucky I can do something for her, or she might not be taking such great pains to help me.

Also, I suspect this youngest member of Hogwarts' faculty feels a strange affinity for the young monster, Snape. In my case, the need to know everything the obscure sciences can teach me about myself is extremely practical, but perhaps the eyedrops we share while we read late into the night remind her of what she needs, and we spend companionable hours lost in the stacks, lost to each other in the forbidden section where one person can't see the other's actions.

In the two weeks until school starts again, the only thing I'm able to work out is that without warning I can turn into a little slice of heaven where there ought to be none.

And this stray bit of heaven damns me to a life without love or touch.

As frustratingly vague as Paracelsus' writing is he's the only one who claims to have cured the dreaded "noli-mi-tangere":

The touch-me-not disease.

"How marvelously man is made and formed if one penetrates into his true nature," is one of the bits from the Great Philosopher's works that floats around in my mind, where, unable to settle on any real sense, it confirms whatever my worst fear happens to be at the moment.

The muggle books Miss Bundle obtains for me say the same thing as the magical texts: whether you call them saints or wizards, the usual way is for someone to have earned the fragment of heaven or purity or whatever you wish to call that precious thing that they drag around through the muck of the earth. These are necessarily more advanced humans because a frustrating, somewhat circular reasoning holds true in both societies: you must be good to be possess good. You must not seek after power to have power. To know something you must know what you need to know.

In my case, however, I provide a certain kind of bliss that everyone wants—the feeling of losing themselves in union with another. And I have none of the wisdom that the great adepts and holy men and women had to have possessed in order to discover the "other half" of themselves, part angel, that lies inside, safely tucked away from the regular person's "crude eyesight."

My cursed solubility means that I lack the "skin" that keeps people safely one thing and not another:

Therefore man has a skin; it delimits the shape of the human body, and through it he can distinguish the two worlds from each other-the Great World and the Little World, the macrocosm and man-and can keep separate that which must not mingle. Thus the Great World remains completely undisturbed in its husk. . . and similarly man in his house, that is to say, his skin. Nothing can penetrate into him, and nothing that is in him can issue outside of him, but everything remains in its place.

Brushing by me in the corridor can mean a brush with the angelic at class change. To the unprepared person this kind of purity is so overwhelming he or she is ready to do anything to hold on to it, including harming the "angel," or each other.

And I know better now than to think that any of it has anything to do with unlovely Snape. James and Sirius fell in love or lust or delusion with something, but it had nothing to do with me.

This True Face business is a misnomer. Or maybe it isn't; maybe half the boys at school got a glimpse of the divine during their crude batterings against me, its keeper. But it's not anything of mine they ever wanted or saw. Probably most of them didn't really grasp they were with another boy at the time.

Lost in these dark musings the night before school is to resume, Miss Bundle makes one of her paranoid gestures with her wand and whispers fiercely, "Haven't I kept up with my end of the bargain?" She gestures at the books littering the table along with my notes.

"Yes, yes of course. Thank you Miss Bundle," I say, my eyes reverting to the Book of Lambspring, which seems marginally more comprehensible than the works of Paracelsus. How was I to know that the people quoting the Great Physick to me all these years were putting the man's thoughts into a sensible context they entirely lacked on their own!

The book disappears.

They all do.

"Then why have you given me this garbage to slather myself with?" Miss Bundle is advancing on me, dangerously close, both for her, and I fear, for myself.

After I made the first batch of Liber Lactima Lotion, as the librarian baptized it for its supposed ability to squeeze out the "tears" of knowledge contained in books and funnel them into her pores, I was convinced that the whole thing must be some type of unhealthy exercise in auto-suggestion I wanted no part of. The strange exaltation that now seemed to grip the young woman most of the time had her walking into things because she didn't take enough care with her wand, and I had to ask her to show me some of the basic charms for finding and filing books so that I could do my own research while she sat with a pile of books on her lap and "read" with her two hands on different volumes and her eyes practically rolled back in her head in ecstasy.

There is no way one of my more desultory efforts in the laboratory produced something that complex and effective, I reason, and so the next lotion I give her is an Ask Me Not, a flawlessly executed placebo designed to turn her mind from imagining she could possibly read through her skin.

"Dumbledore put you up to this, didn't he? After I told you all about my confreres and sent owls halfway around the world in the service of your little existential crisis, you repay me with this excrement?" She flings the little pot of lotion on the table. "Last night I rubbed myself with it and lay down with Pliny the Younger and all I got was a stiff neck. You, of all of them, I thought I could count on not to go all moral on me."

"Calm down, Miss Bundle, I'm sure I must have gotten distracted by all the fine volumes you obtained for me and neglected some crucial calculation in my potion," I say in a soothing voice, trying not to be hurt at her estimation of my morals. "Let me see if I can figure out what I did wrong."

In the laboratory I spend a few hours trying to remember what I did the first time, and then test it on myself. Perhaps it's because my system is so fatally different, but coating my wand-hand with it has me listening to Dumbledore speaking in a far-off wing of the castle.

"As I hoped, Severus has been spending a great deal of time in the library trying to understand what he is. I fear there aren't many books in existence that will help him, but at the very least he's enlisting Miss Bundle's many talents for something other than her usual pursuits. He may do that poor woman some good even if he finds none for himself."

Hastily, I wash my hand off in the sink. I don't want to hear that man dissecting me like one of the worms whose carcasses litter my worktable. At around midnight I return to the library where the hungry, hunted Miss Bundle sits drumming her fingers on her desk. "Let's see if this is better."

Though no one would believe that the slut for half the school could have such scruples, I am actually a prudish person, especially at this time in my life. I have to turn away from the sight of the librarian with several buttons of her high-necked blouse undone, rubbing herself with lotion and then pressing a book to her chest so that she may drink a book into her pores with a look of ecstasy on her face.


	11. Chapter 11

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 11: Long Sleeves

Many other people's expressions cause me to turn away with the advent of the new semester.

As for James, he returned to school soon after everyone else had begun second term, pale and thin and with something wounded in his eyes that turns mean when I ignore him. Could he want to look at me when I almost killed him? It seems impossible, but there were his eyes, looking through any ward Dumbledore could throw up, accusing me of something I couldn't identify. Loving him? Leaving him? Nearly cutting his young life short?

I have long nights in my new private room to gnaw at this bone. Deemed unsafe for close quarters, I have what I longed for so many times and now seems like a sentence—my own room. It's not in any of the House towers, which is nice. I can just be—solitary-forever, taking-no-sides Severus Snape.

When I'm not cramming my head full of facts as a kind of emotional suicide, I lie there and plan my escape to Romania. Or some other place where I can be alone and in the fresh air so that my solitude doesn't weigh so heavily. I wonder if Vin is a Muggle and that's why I didn't hurt him. I never found him attractive, though, so maybe he didn't see this famous "True Face" everyone finds so irresistible.

I abandon the laboratory for a while, one of the only times in my life when I have lost faith in my hands' wisdom as separate from any kind of grace or morality. But I make and unmake a thousand potions in my head. Things that will neutralize my neutral nature. Things that will temporarily blind a partner. I try to make a few potions that will suppress my desire for sex, but it seems that just like the spell Dumbledore cast to keep my deadly ejaculate from appearing, anything I try to suppress just comes out another way like the blue fluid coursed from my chest.

When I hex myself so I don't want to think about James, it's almost like Reaper's Reward all over again: my potions explode, or I walk into walls, or other people's magic doesn't work right within a ten foot radius. These days my chest gives a sympathetic throb when James is around, and to a lesser extent, Sirius, but for the most part sex is just a constant ache I work at pushing to the back of my mind.

One day just after term has begun I'm searching in a section of the library I don't frequent.

"What are you looking for?" asks a sated Miss Bundle. She's taken to wearing more voluminous robes and I shudder to think of some books having found their way inside her clothing.

"A fairy tale, actually. The Prince of the Seven Veils. This one here isn't the right version," and I show her the story about a young man who was so beautiful he had to wear seven veils just to keep people from going blind in his presence.

"What's wrong with it? It's the version I heard as a child, but there are others." With a motion of her wand the librarian summons different versions. In one, the prince is so vain he has no regard for any of the female suitors who are attracted to him in droves, and after they all perish in the trials he sets before him he dies alone and unloved.

In other versions, he turns himself into a frog or a beggar with the mange and finds a woman who loves him for who he is before he reveals himself in his true beauty.

Bundle surveys my frown. "Why? What version did you hear?"

"The one where he throws acid on himself to escape the mobs that would tear him apart and the arranged marriage his parents have set for him, so he can marry the commoner he loves. But he ends up blinding and disfiguring himself so badly she can't love him and he spends the rest of his days singing songs for alms under her window where she lives with another."

"I've never heard such a grisly tale," and from Bundle, who regularly sleeps with some of the most terrifying selections from the fiction section, that's saying something. "Didn't anyone ever tell you stories you were a child?"

"That's the tale that my grandmother told me," I snap, and turn away before That Look can take on another nuance.

I return to my studies and miserable thoughts at the table that is widely recognized as my own, but I'm interrupted from one of these miserable daydreams by a girl plunking herself in front of me.

"What do you want?" No one approaches me, ever. I look around in panic. What if Dumbledore thinks I'm branching out?

"I wanted to tell you that we're here for you."

My eyes narrow. "And who, pray tell, is 'we'?" My mind is turning to some secret society for same-sex-loving wizards and witches.

"MAHB-US," she said. "Muggles And Half-Bloods United Society."

Close enough, I think, closing my eyes to this latest trial upon my patience. When I open my eyes she's still there. "And why would your 'society' suddenly take an interest in me when I've never heard from you before?" I ask.

Not knowing about the wards that kept all female students, especially, from thinking twice about me, she doesn't have a good answer. "I don't know; you always seemed so self-sufficient before."

"And now I seem like a wounded kitten?" I say with my nastiest sneer.

She looks at me appraisingly. It's not That Look, but it's a near cousin. "Something like it," she says and slides a parchment to me.

Finally I place her among the peers who run together for me after all these years. "You're Miss Evans, the only other one without a familiar," I remark. Everyone else has their cat or rat or something as a magical familiar.

"Yes, I don't like to see any creature caged," she says as she leaves.

There is absolutely no way I am going to sit in a circle and cry about my conflicted upbringing. Particularly now that I know it was all caused by my aberrant nature. My father should have done much worse to me, and I'll tell anyone so who gives me the chance.

But I am curious how this girl, whose name is Lilly, is making the connections between my outed sexual deviancy and my condition as a Half-breed—which I wasn't sure anyone knew about. Have I ever spoken one true word about my background to anyone at Hogwarts?

Oh, those gossips, the faculty, the ones who knew everything about me all the while and were merely playing along so I wouldn't get mad and touch them. The hypocrites must have said something about it. Perhaps I'm a cautionary tale about mixed marriages.

Nevertheless, wanting to know Lilly's take on the situation distracts me from my misery, and that's sufficient at this low point in my life. Thinking the exercise is so dreary that Dumbledore can't help but approve, I don't rebuff her the next time she approaches me in the library.

"So how are you?" she queries after sitting down across from me without asking. And she sits very quietly so that there is room for my answer.

I don't think anyone has ever asked me that in my entire life.

Much less actually cared what the answer was.

The laugh is out of my mouth before I know what's happening. It sounds a little like the way James used to laugh at me and I finally realize that it's the sound one makes when there are no words for something huge.

"That bad, eh? Listen, I think you should know," she leans across the table and I can smell her hair. A girly smell that seems foreign. And way too close. "You're not the only one."

I gape at her. Not the only Alkahest? It can't be possible. We would have shagged each other into a puddle by now.

"Do you know Esther Tinings?" she asks, referring to an athletic girl a year behind us, who I am positive I have seen snogging a boy at several Student Balls.

"Yes, she seems very comfortably settled and altogether normal," I say.

"Make a loud noise or a sudden move around her, and see what happens," she says and gets up to go.

It annoys me to no end that I'm being pulled into some strange scene without knowing what it is, but I can't resist going near Esther Tinings at mealtime and dropping a teacup.

She pales and withdraws into herself, her hands clutched under her armpits. She looks at me with utter terror and her face seems blotchy on one side. It all happens so fast, and then it is over. A couple of her muggle-born friends soothe her and give me hateful looks. Are they muggles? I've never given much thought about it.

That night Lilly comes to my habitual place and moves aside some advanced potion books without apology.

"Why did you have me do that?" I demand. "The Tinings girl is obviously traumatized and you had me scare her half out of her skin."

"I just didn't want you thinking you were the only one," she says in that adult voice that drives me crazy.

"I don't know what you think you know about me, Ms. Evans, but I can assure you I do not go around probing in people's childhood wounds for the fun of it."

She's not listening to me, because her eyes are on my hands, which have disappeared up the sleeves of my robe. "I noticed immediately when you first came to school," she says softly. "Any of us could see you'd had a very difficult time, but when you're small you don't know how to say things properly, do you?" Her eyes search my face and I think it might be some sort of bid for forgiveness. "We thought you'd find one of us, the way we all found someone in our houses. But the Slytherins in the group said you spend all your time with Madam Lessmore, and I thought she was helping you."

There is something hypnotic about her gaze, about having what already rates as the longest serious conversation I have ever had with a student, no less a girl. "Lessmore is the best friend I could have." The traitorous phrase, "second mother" is quelled from my lips just in time. She doesn't deserve that responsibility.

"Sometimes it's good to talk to someone your own age," Lilly says in a small voice, the way you would talk while approaching a wild animal, still looking at my hands disappeared up my sleeves. "You've never told the nurse what happened with your hands, have you?"

My hands instinctively withdraw farther up my sleeves, which I have always favored rather long.

As does Lilly.

Very slowly, she takes out her wand and pronounces a spell that vaguely registers as a reversal of a cloaking glamour. An ugly burn, much worse on her left hand but stretching across to part of her right, appears where I never saw it before.

"You're left-handed," I whisper, and my eyes slide up to her face to stop looking at the puckered skin.

"My mother scalded my hand when I unconsciously did some protective magic with it. It happens to a lot of magical children who aren't properly grounded. You're unusual in that you can still do such things, and consciously control it." She looks at my sleeves. "You withdraw your hands into your robe when you feel threatened," and it's like she's telling me a truth such as Paracelsus' Doctrine of Signatures—once you know it, it changes everything. "Are you glamouring a scar?"

For the first time in my life I open a coffer in which I have been storing the precious, terrible things that make me myself, according to Aunt Adele's fatalistic definition. It's like opening a secret treasure whose harsh light, shining from a metal too dangerous to be touched, spills over our faces in that remote corner of the library. I tell this near-stranger about my father tying me up, the nightmares about my fingers turning into maggots. I tell her a little about the strange magic that I can sometimes summon without any normal methods.

"Lots of us have nightmares," she says.

"And by 'us' you mean half-bloods and muggle-borns?" I ask, suddenly very tired.

"There are a few pure bloods, but all but one of them had a step-parent who was a muggle." She stops a question with her still-unglamored hand. "Dumbledore knows about the group's existence, but that's all," she says. "We never discuss any specifics of what goes on there anywhere but in our meeting space. I do hope you'll join us."

She waits for the objection I immediately pose, and then sits very patiently for the volley of insults, sneers and rationalizations to subside.

This trick of hers—this listening thing—is very unnerving.

"You don't have to say or do anything. Part of my reason for inviting you is to see if you can recommend any potion or remedy for the nightmares. We're all rather easy to pick out if you listen for the noises we make in our sleep."

The glamour is back on her hand and she is gone.

Just when I thought my misery was complete, this girl gives me unasked-for information about the way the world works, and now the odd sensation that I am not alone makes me feel claustrophobic. I've never shared anything in my life, but now I can't help but see the other students who duck their heads or fight with the slightest provocation. The other exaggeratedly long sleeves. The other cries in the darkness coming from my very house. Their situations are completely different than mine; I have no right to the simplistic worldview that would allow me to be angry about my upbringing.

But I am angry.

It's a holy kind of outrage that overcomes me once I start sensing the clumsy glamours that cover the traces of injustice some students bear. When I see through Sophia Teasdale's spell she uses to cover a cheekbone partially sunken by an inhuman blow, something in me snaps. All of the information about others' secret pains that I have been denied by my isolation bursts through the protective wards.

This is one of the last bits of my childhood dying. I don't know who to hold responsible for what all of these children have suffered at the hands of parents who didn't understand them, but all I know is that they, unlike me, deserved better than what they got.

I say the password Lilly gave me and walk into the classroom filled with over 30 students, my body tensed for jeering or worse, sympathy.

They scarcely look up. A Slytherin boy one year behind me was talking.

"It's all right, Horace," Lilly says. And she waits until he forgets about my presence and starts speaking again.

These are things I did not want to know.

Some of the older students interject questions or support while the meeting progresses, but it is undoubtedly Lilly who is at the center of it. My skin becomes saturated by all the free-floating misery in the air, and so I choose to focus on this stick-thin girl with a red ponytail who has asked me to come and share this communion of pain. She has left the glamour off her wand-hand and she directs the meeting with it, coaxing, calming the energy around the room.

She looks at me and suddenly all eyes follow.

"Have you ever tried a skin-salve for the nightmares?" I ask no one in particular, my non-sneering voice echoing strangely in the room. "It's not as drastic a Dreamless Sleep, which can have, er, long-term consequences." I think of my aunt-like reflection as a prime example. "Putting a light coating of one of these unguents on the forehead and wand-hand has provided me with some relief at times."

"Is it safe?" squeaks one young boy, who seems a little flustered by my presence.

The insult falls from my lips before it starts. "I will consult with Nurse Lessmore, obviously," I say to Lilly. "Any remedy should be personalized to an individual's magic," I add, and her eyes chase the unexpected pain that hides behind that statement. "But we can conduct a few trials in the infirmary, should anyone be interested."

It turns out no one wants to treat so much as the subject of their nightmares in the infirmary, so Lilly joins me in Lessmore's office and we consider a possible arsenal of very mild skin treatments to be tested in a less intimidating setting.

From Lilly's stiff posture I can tell she is also rather intimidated by my friend, so I do my best to make her feel comfortable, speaking about my first few months living in the infirmary. Lessmore betrays no surprise that I am talking openly

about the sorry state in which I arrived at Hogwarts, and suggests certain compounds to start with in my new career as potion-maker for the wounded.

"I suggest you make notes and we begin a study of what works and what doesn't," she says, always efficient. "Perhaps I can arrange for special credit for the two of you." Lilly looks pleased. "You should allow for extra time in the laboratory, Severus. Even these weak medicaments for psychological ailments are highly individual," and the words are accompanied by an emphasis I catch. Everything I know about myself is useless when it comes to a normal person's reactions.

And so a new chapter of my life begins, one filled with sympathetic friends, new projects, and also a new respect from the faculty. Bundle lends a hand when I ask her for help with obtaining some of the psychological tomes that are so lacking in our library. She delivers them to me with a look that is eloquent about her opinion of those who seek to deliver themselves from their lot in life.

Far from this sort of optimism, it's all I can do to keep my fury from leaking out and warping the walls of whatever room I find myself in.

The teachers, and most of all the Headmaster, they continue this charade, year after year, as if every child's past melts away when they reach the gates of paradise, and every hurt can be cured by a sweetie from Dumbledore's cupboard and a cryptic word of encouragement.

If Lilly had tried to intervene while she saw the familiar signs of someone waking up to the sharp-edged, unjust world around them, we would have never become true friends.

As it was, she came by most nights of the week to the library table everyone now treated as ours. We studied together—she distracted me by asking very clever questions and making fun of my seriousness in a way that was anything but unpleasant. She herself was absolutely serious about the confidentiality of the group, and thus never spoke about anyone's situation unless she was visiting me in the lab while I tried a gentle Cooling salve on a mouse before readying it for human trials.

My role quickly expanded for the next several weeks after the initial successes with calming the worst of many students' nightmares. Not wanting to leave my fellow group members to merely quiet the nightmares, I suggested a Boggart to help develop the defensive resources many so sorely lacked. Lilly was dead set against it until I loosed one of the creatures when she came to visit the laboratory, and the terrifying specter of her mother shrunk immediately to the size of a button when it became too much for her.

"Bastard!" she yelled at me. "How did you do that?" she asked immediately afterward.

Her intellect was so curious it quickly overpowered any hurt, and I couldn't help but admire this about Lilly.

"They've never given me much trouble," I shrug at the tiny Boggart that looks a little runny.

"You must have faced all of your fears," she says admiringly.

I snort. "Hardly."

In fact, we get along so well that our occasional rows wound me very deeply. Lilly cannot help herself—she is called to heal, and now that I am in her circle, I am treated to the same dubious honor.

She never forces me to talk about myself, and I certainly have nothing to say like the stories I hear from the other students, but she takes my reticence as proof of secret pains so terrible they are just crying out for release and understanding.

The few times she has tried to fit what little she knows of my life into the mold of the other students' stories, I have been polite but firm.

The other group members get over their distaste for me very quickly—and I rather miss it. The mostly-female group takes to the presence of this male-loving-male a little too well when there are no boys present. They let down one veil too many around me—sitting a little differently, talking openly about boys and critiquing each other's appearance the way they don't when even the youngest male student is there. It's like they recognize I'm the last of a species, forever without a mate but a useful mine of information about "regular" boys. My status as a eunuch in the harem can't help but smart, but they're right: I'm not able to be with my choice of mate, and there are enough differences between me and the other male students I might as well have crawled out of the primordial ooze unique.

One day after I have been in the group a little over a month I am teaching a few rudiments of shielding. All of these children, to a one, have underdeveloped supporter hands and throw all of their might into the dominant hand. While they talk about their psychological prattle I set them to bouncing a ball in the non-dominant hand. Careful not to wake up any sleeping pain, I try a mild hypnosis on one. They are all extremely suggestible and this terrifies me for their sake. I set paper dragons on them and tell them they are as big as elephants, and then teach them mental tricks to get their analytical minds to overcome the emotional one that has taken control.

It is clear there is much to be done, but the students are excited that there are concrete steps they can take to improve their well-being.

Lilly's mind is visibly whirring away with new possibilities and I smile at her restless intelligence over the head of a young female student who is mastering her fear of a small paper dragon with a huge dark shadow.

"You needn't think about why you're shielding yourself," I say gently to a girl a year older than me, one of the ones who is so grateful for the scar cream I've been working on. She shakes her head tensely and I get a clear vision of her protecting herself and her mother from her father's anger. These flashes of insight happen sometimes and I have learned to run with it. "If you learn to block now you can help people in the present the way your mother couldn't help you in the past," I say very quietly.

Lilly is suddenly right next to me. "Is that what happened with your mother?" she asks with unusual directness.

"Never speak of her!" I am roaring before I can stop myself. "She gave everything to me, EVERYTHING! Never hint that that was not enough!" I am trembling and she doesn't know enough to recognize the signs that my magic is what is making the contours of the room shift.

"Severus, I didn't mean," she says, using my first name for the first time and reaching towards my arm, the way she would comfort any group member.

"NEVER TOUCH ME!" I l have just enough self-control to leap ten feet backwards rather than shove her with the magic that is making my fingernails ripple.

Lilly just stands there and looks thoughtful.

It's eerie how no one does anything. The others are neither looking at me nor away from me.

The sympathy in the air makes my skin crawl.

I slam out of the room and avoid our library table for several days. Finally, Lilly comes to the laboratory that is now "mine" for all intents and purposes.

"What do you want?" I say in my best nasty voice when I feel her energy in the doorway. Close proximity has shown that her magic is a rare deep indigo with hints of a light green. Normally it soothes me like being near the ocean, but on this occasion it's making me itch.

She's giving me some horrible teenage version of That Look that adults use on me. I can feel it. My eyes tilt up and meet the offending gaze. "I could have smashed your head against the wall," I say conversationally. "It's beyond my conscious control, sometimes. My magic could squeeze out yours like a squashed grape," I'm getting warmed up now. All of my fears just naturally come out around this young woman, and I'm winding myself up for a nice self-hatred session with the additional counterpoint of her anger and hurt feelings. "I could—"

"I couldn't tell you about this with a note because we have taken an oath never to put it to paper," she says, conjuring a map of the school so she can point out a room in an unfamiliar corridor. "The meetings are at seven on Wednesdays, but you can't enter without taking the Unbreakable Vow that you will never reveal what goes on there."

She is gone.

I don't like noticing that my evening just became one monotonous self-flagellation session without her presence.

In fact, I don't like noticing that the other students' distant friendliness has continued, but without Lilly's attention it means nothing.

Thoroughly amused by the idea of going to yet another secret group, this time with a childish vow required, I go to the meeting. I want to know what she's been keeping from me.

The slight red-haired girl is waiting for me at the door. "Take out your wand," she instructs in that friendly yet neutral way that drives me mad sometimes. She intones the first part of the Unbreakable Vow and then I say my part, though obviously we don't touch. Even if we had, the thing is laughably easy to break. The vow is like a vine that gets attached to the swearer, but all it needs is some other living thing to wind around, and as long as that thing doesn't do what you have vowed not to do—a cat doesn't mistakenly tell people what goes on in these meetings, for instance—everyone is fine. I file this knowledge away for future use, and step into the small room.

The moment someone starts speaking I wish I hadn't.

There were things that I did not want to know about the human race.

I never had a high opinion of people, but the revolting things that have been done to these mere children by depraved adults makes me want to hunt down each of the offenders and kill them in some untraceable way.

Lilly is looking at me in that horrible way she has, as if she is reading my mind. I am drowning in her gaze and it's all I can do to stay seated.

It is this meeting that drives home the fact that without wards—and there are no wards here, except for the one at the door; Dumbledore himself can't enter—people's emotional troubles stick to me very easily. At the end I am sweating and nauseous and have a terrible headache.

But I still feel as though I should feel worse for fairness' sake. It's as though I have stumbled into a church and am witnessing a sacred rite that should be reserved for only true believers. Yet the students who talk in only a whisper seem to find no fault with my being there. One of the few boys looks at me imploringly and I wonder if he is struggling with liking other boys. Feeling totally inadequate, I make a move to leave as soon as it is over, but Lilly holds me back with a look.

"When will you see that I am not a victim!" I spit at her now that we are alone. "I don't deserve your sympathy. I don't deserve your friendship. I'm very selfishly letting you think whatever kind things you think about me, because I am terrified of being alone."

She lets me go with that set angle to her jaw, and we enter into a phase of all-out war. Her, insisting that all my problems are due to self-hatred and trauma, specifically some unconfessed sexual trauma, me getting more and more impatient with this patently false hypothesis.

Our friendship begins to wither. I can't bear the sensation that I am the wolf among the sheep at the regular meetings, and I refuse to return to the special sessions.

Lilly comes to my laboratory. I am basking in my monstrousness, and her presence only adds fuel to the fire. "Come to save me again this evening?" I sneer. "Perhaps another time. We're quite comfortably damned for the night," I say on behalf of my mice coated in multicolored unguents.

Her hand is suddenly only one inch away from the skin on my forearm. How did she get through? Thank Hermés that my shield functioned well enough to stop her that last inch!

I'm staring at this girl's hand that is one inch away from some terrible reaction I don't want to think about.

"Whatever someone did to you," she's saying. "I'm here for you."

I don't have the energy to play these games anymore. "Talk to Dumbledore, Ms. Evans. You asked for it—you think you can handle the truth; talk to him. My secrets aren't even my own within these castle walls."

Lilly isn't in class for the next several days.

She is supposedly ill, though no one knows what ails her.

Except for me.

All I can feel is guilt over having allowed her to think for a moment that I belonged among the victims instead of the evil-doers. Kind-hearted as she is, she must be thinking of a way to gently uninvite me from her groups.

I also realize during this time that there is nothing lyrical about me, and my metaphorical store is limited to the things I know—potions and unpleasantness. But all I can compare it to is the Reveal when you're making a compound.

At some point after realizing I had lost Lilly forever comes the Reveal that had been stewing for some time.

The familiar blue-green of her magic gains substance in her absence. It surges over my tongue like a tidal wave. I taste her with my knees and smell her with my hands. Everything in me is wet and shivering with a sense of the deep that stays with me long after that first rush of feeling.

It's as though I suddenly realize that this girl who is everywhere, involved in nearly everything at the school, but who never calls attention to herself—I see that she is everything that is foreign. It's like finding a piece of the moon that has fallen out of the sky and lodged itself on a street you know well. All of a sudden there is nothing tame or familiar about this creature, who I had mistakenly thought couldn't frighten me because she is a mere girl.

Lilly has infinite power over me because I am curious.

Hermès, but I am curious about her!

So much of my life has been about biding my time knowing that tomorrow would be more of the same, but Lilly is everything that is enticing about not knowing what will happen next. Her oddness, which now shines at me as if it was just spit out of the forges of creation, is the perfect match for me, the experiment gone wrong that bears all the marks of the universe's sick sense of humor.

Lilly, I suddenly realize, is like no one so much as Dumbledore. Being near her means you are in her space, but unlike the headmaster, she gets inside of you. Hers is a geometry that wants only to make your existing equations turn out more gently.

It's terrifying, needing her to show me who I am, needing her playful green irises to teach me what I feel, and knowing she'll never look at me the same again.

Unless she's out sick because she's seen my True Face!

My heart rings with dread until I realize—it's more like I saw hers.

Besides, this couldn't be some strange effect related to my condition, because I do not feel 20 feet tall. Quite the opposite: if Lilly were standing right here, I would feel puny and awkward. The idea of meeting her eyes with this knowledge is daunting, but the prospect of never seeing her again is worse. The fact that her body is a complete unknown to me simply heightens the feeling of danger.

I love her.

It's a very private feeling. The same I would have if I were to find out I had a malady that caused a wasting death. I would treasure all of the changes my body went through gradually, keeping them to myself because only I would know exactly how much was suffering and how much was ease.

That this love is doubly, triply doomed because I can't touch her, and because I have no desire to touch her, reassures me that my beautiful pain will always be my own.


	12. Chapter 12

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 12: The Pelican

When I see the red-haired foreigner in Monday morning Magical Creatures, I forget to be afraid of the change I know must be visible in my eyes, because she is a changed young woman.

Lilly doesn't look at me, but the anger is rolling off of her in waves. She's learned my shielding lessons so well that no one, including the professor, notices her anger.

Me, she lets straight in to the black heart of it all.

It is the first time that I realize she has opened up a special window into her deepest self just for me.

My first look at her with my new awareness is at a young woman who wears her red hair carelessly back in a ponytail to show her complete rejection of the ladylike standards expected of her in both the muggle and the wizard world. She is more than a little wild and her high cheekbones and green eyes give her a kind of elfin quality.

She lets me look at her and her face is hard.

I know better than to approach her, so I'm sitting in my private room, attaining a new level of self-hatred, when someone knocks.

The changed Lilly stands at the door. "Can I come in?" she asks listlessly.

"Let's take a walk," I suggest, pulling a jumper off my bureau and handing it to her. We walk outside and she doesn't protest about it being against the rules after hours. This new Lilly has little use for rules.

"I'm not angry at you, Severus," she says as soon as we're outside.

My heart leaps with relief. She's not angry with me!

She kicks at some leaves. The jumper looks good on her. I take some pleasure from something of mine being close to her.

"Dumbledore on the other hand—" she actually spits on the ground. "He warded you off like a contagious creature so many years when I could have at least offered you friendship. He let lies be passed off as truth about what happened with James." Here I wonder how much she knows about all the other boys, but she is talking too fast. "He didn't let you know what you were for years—of course you got in trouble not knowing about your condition!"

She stops in the path where we have been walking. "And most of all I'm furious for having been one of his plans, an approved friend to help redirect your energy into something therapeutic."

She expels the word like a curse.

"I'm not bloody safe," she shouts into the darkness.

The look on her face is so dark and embittered that I can't help but agree with her. It's what I realized myself several days ago. "I'm beginning to see that," I say softly.

She pushes her hair out of her eyes and frowns but says nothing.

By this time we're near the lake and together, with some fumbling, we conjure a blanket so we can sit on the smooth stones. She may be losing one of the last bits of her childhood—the faith that adults, especially Dumbledore, always tell the truth and act in the best interests of young people—but she can still do that unnerving listening thing.

We sit silently for a while. Once more, she opens up a window into her mind, and I can see the play of images:

Her noticing that Professor Cabinet tries to spoil my potions sometimes out of frustration at my far superior knowledge, and me using my special senses to correct the ingredients every time. Her impression of Dumbledore directing the symphony of the school with his doddering cover, and what it must be like, being the undisputed head of a tiny kingdom of mostly children. Her catching some of the boys casting surreptitious looks at me—looks with a mixture of desire and fear. And I get to see her vision of the wards doing their work of keeping other students away from me—it's amazing how I never realized all the ways normal students are part of each other's lives, for good or ill.

"How do all of you stand it, bothering each other with all that talking," I think, but Lilly just stares at me, so I repeat the sentence aloud.

"I don't know, what's it like for you?" she asks. "Show me what you see."

After several frustrated minutes in which I tear great holes in my shield and Lilly and I concentrate to the point of a headache, we're forced to admit defeat.

"But I've been able to do Lilligimency since I was a child," I mutter.

"Oh really?" Lilly is smiling at me. "I've always heard it pronounced 'Legilimency.'"

The proper word for thought transmission is also something I've known since childhood, but my slip of the tongue must have a lot to do with Lilly, who's surveying the blush creeping across my face.

Suddenly, I'm glad that she can't read my thoughts.

We experiment a little more and come to a compromise: I place a version of my thoughts through the window she opens in her mind.

And so Lilly gets the benefit of all my treasured painful images to accompany the black flower that has been germinating my whole life as it begins to bloom from my throat.

I tell her things I've not told anyone about my mother's illness and death, the brute facts fractured with painfully collected hindsight. At the end of it I've made some of the sandy dirt near the lake's edge float in the air the way the paint did in our dying house. She looks at me through the dust of my childhood, green eyes shining through the entropy I grew up in. I am frightened to the core by her face whose features seem like a language I have forgotten how to decipher, but whose sounds fill me with longing.

We sit for a long time by the pond in the dark. She throws pebbles in until the monstrous turtle comes up to the surface, annoyed until he sees me. He cocks his head and I bow to him. "Thank you, friend," I say. "He got me out of trouble once." It really wasn't so long ago, but I've exchanged one despair for another, bittersweet and darkly beautiful.

"You should have told me, Severus. Everything I ever yelled at you about was wrong."

"Maybe it was nice to think someone saw me as a victim rather than a murderer, even if I knew the truth."

No matter what I do I can't escape from those green eyes struggling to accept my strange place in the scheme of things. "There's nothing that can be done, Lilly." I say, comforting her as I would never try to comfort myself. "I'm very fortunate that Dumbledore let me come here in the first place. Without his protection I probably would have gotten in much worse trouble, maybe killed several people and ended up in the juvenile wing of Azkaban, if there is such a thing."

She shakes her head angrily. "No. You do not belong in such a place."

I thrust my arm under her nose and jab at a vein. "Don't you always remember me being extraordinarily gifted? It was the magic I stole from my mother. Everything I do is very literally fueled by her. You didn't see her. We had to tie her to the chair to keep her head from falling in her gruel. The house was coming down around us. I was digesting it."

For a long time I go on, describing my mother's illness, my father's anger, the horrible sinking sensation the house gave me, as if it were mirroring my mother's decay. It's like the pain from my early years has been walled off and we've stumbled upon its mummy, intact, lying like the dark form of the lake in front of us.

"Severus," her hand ghosts over my arm, two inches away, and she dares me to move it. "You're good and bad just like the rest of us. The stakes are just unfairly high."

Now that she knows everything, I listen to her with a dumb acceptance. Whatever she says is at least some sound in a place that has been silent forever. I am glad to be rid of this terrible solitary burden, though I am still guilty of my mother's death. That both these things can be so clear in my mind confuses me.

We go through the motions several days a week in our group, but both of us have our mind on something else. The knowledge that she has about me puts us in a private place. I've taken some of the last of this girl's childhood. (At this point in our adolescence you can practically see it running out inexorably like an hourglass in all of us). Through her new eyes the world is suddenly a much bigger place, with a much more confused morality. To Lilly, I am a helper and a friend, and I am also a dangerous monster. Me, I see her changing before my eyes and I want to stop it, halt this latest way I have of stealing. But at the same time this bruising is bringing her closer to me.

If I feel bad at first about the new cynical Lilly, I need to see my reflection too much to object for long. When she looks at me across the dinner table her eyes boil with an outrage that is the reflection I do not have.

What have I done to this fundamentally good person who has been so kind to me?

With all my will I hide what I have learned about my feelings for her. Being able to be close to someone I love is more than a freak like me can ask for. Anything else would be selfish.

_The Pelican_

_Lastly, the ancient Spagyrists having placed Lili in a pelican and dried it, fixed it by means of a regulated increase of the fire, continued so long until from blackness, by permutation into all the colours, it became red as blood, and therewith assumed the condition of a salamander. Rightly, indeed, did they proceed with such labour, and in the same way it is right and becoming that everyone should proceed who seeks this pearl._

_-Paracelsus_

Lilly isn't in my Defense Against the Dark Arts class, the last one of the day, so much the worse for me. The instructor, Professor Wheedle, seems to have the same philosophy about teaching that Aunt Adele did—get them started and watch them maul each other. He is a man of indeterminate age who gives the impression that he is assuming a greater age than he is, just to get out of having to actually participate in life. He does have a talent for sniffing out weakness, usually, sometimes strengths.

Luckily he has apparently decided to ignore my existence rather than try to sort out what is strength and what is weakness in my aberrated set of qualities. This is a relief, rather than being called up and occasionally dissected in front of the class, as everyone else has had happen at least once. As far as I'm concerned, this roving humiliating is the dark art, and the only reason I defend against it is because he rightly senses I'll loose some of my own dark arts on him if he crosses me.

Mostly he just sits there with hooded eyes and watches people flounder around with Boggarts or flies that can be tuned to a magical signature (which do nothing to me).

This day he appears actually interested in something. "Today we will learn about weaponry from a special guest," he says from the chair from which he directs his students' fumbling.

Lilly hunches in. I can tell she is suffering greatly but it takes me a moment to realize it is something far worse than just the normal humiliation at the hands of Wheedle. The lesson is to be on daggers thrown at the student, who is supposed to defend against them. They're magical daggers, which means they're for all intents and purposes letter openers—dull bits of metal that have been spelled to sense a wizard's weakness. That is, they act more like divining rods that allow the attacker to know which is the best spell to use on a magical organism.

Wheedle throws one at her and I am halfway out of my chair to protest when she catches it by the handle.

He throws another and another. She's juggling them in the air and adding more, throwing some into the ground where they stick upright in the cracks between the stones. When she has situated all the dull knives either in the floor or fanned out in her right hand, he suddenly conjures a sword that I can feel slice through the air.

She catches it mid-spin with her wand-hand, the left.

There is a silence. I can feel the tears beating against her eyelids.

"So you see, class, familiarity with muggle weapons can be useful—" and predictably, he draws the savor out of the moment in order to make it some dull exercise. For once I'm glad of it. To the tune of Wheedle's lecture Lilly sinks onto an empty bench. Then class is dismissed. Before she can run out I'm at her ear whispering.

"You are coming with me now."

A girl much meeker than the one that just dazzled everyone with her weapons prowess just stands there in the hall.

"Do you want to go to the infirmary?"

She barely shakes her head.

"Do you want to go to your dormitory?"

She shakes her head a little harder.

"Do you want to go to my room?" I ask without thinking.

We're walking through the now-empty halls and end up in my room without anyone stopping us. Not that I think Dumbledore would at this point.

She sinks down on the bed in what I think is a faint. But she really seems in some type of trance. Her body is by turns rigid and trembling. There is evidence of some sort of internal struggle washing across her face in between the blankness. I'm glad she didn't want to go to the infirmary because I don't want to be blamed for this, but also because it seems like some sort of fascinating internal combustion and I don't want Lessmore, however well-meaning she might be, to stop it.

However, it's not healthy for her organism to be receiving this assault, so my mind is racing to find the right remedy. Hating to leave her alone, I streak down to the potions laboratory I've carved out for myself in the basement and come back with dozens of jars and bottles, along with a few wooden spatulas.

The calming salves we worked on together for the support group have a negligible effect, and any attempt to get her to swallow something without touching her proves a likely way to make her choke. Her body arches up as if she is having a seizure.

"Severus Snape, you useless lout, I give you ten minutes more and then she's off to Lessmore," I swear to myself, my eyes searching around the room.

The pelican.

from Andreas Libavius' Alchymia, 1606

I had bought the glass apparatus, which is like a two-chambered gourd or a pot-bellied figure with its thin "arms" stretched up to its "head," which is a slim tube with an opening. It was in the curio cabinet of a potions ingredients shop I patronize on Diagon Alley, and the shop owner didn't know it was actually useful. My heart panged in my chest because the dusty glass reminded me of my mother—she showed me how to distill a concoction that needs to be heated slowly and then its force attenuated by the narrow "waist" until the vapor comes out the top spout. Held with a metal clamp, that this incomplete specimen lacked by the time it came to me, the pelican's vapors are wafted near the person who is ill—in my memory, me, when I was very young and had a high fever for no apparent cause.

My hands are busy cleaning the pelican and twisting a bit of wire for the clamp, but once ready, it is not at all clear to me what I should put in it. Lilly is writhing on my bed, and I wrench my mind from thinking of lying with her, her wonderful blue-green magic flowing over me—

"Par le Trismégiste, et por l'Ancien et mystique ordre de la Rose-Croix," I implore the adepts of all ages to lend me their wisdom.

Blue. Blue. I think of everything that is Lilly to me and I can taste the blue on my tongue. The solutions littering my desk take on a new light. Really not wishing to leave her alone again, my eyes travel to my shelf, a sort of altar to my mother. Her potion label is there, and her wedding picture. A stack of letters, one I wrote on each of her birthdays since she died. Some other odds and ends of sentimental rather than useful value.

Flowers of Antimony. My mother used to use them in a hair pomade, but I perfected that recipe long ago. They're too costly, too volatile, and there's always the risk of insomnia. And they're red, not blue, the opposite of what I would normally seek out for her.

This is my last effort before the ten minutes are up, so, feeling foolish, I mix the substance with a base potion that will bind the best qualities and smooth out some of the harshness—antimony is a very decided Red Active, not something you want on your skin. It only needs to be heated for a moment on my makeshift flame, and a thin stream of vapor starts to emerge from the spout.

Holding the antique vessel with the clumsy handle, I move it closer to her, careful not to let the steam get on her skin.

After no time at all she lets out a sigh.

After five minutes most of the steam is gone, and I'm just about to make more, when she says with her eyes closed, "Severus?"

"Do you want to talk now or do you want to sleep?" I ask.

"Hmmm?"

Taking that as a preference for sleep, I make a new potion with a calming agent and have it close to her bedside in no time.

"What is that?" she opens one eye to regard the glass apparatus.

"A pelican. You should sleep. Stay here."

She smiles as if that was the most enchanting thing she's ever heard. "A pelican! Imagine!" she exclaims and rolls up in my blankets.

"Tell me a story, Severus," she says in a small voice from deep within my bedding. One of her hands is rhythmically clenching and unclenching the blanket.

With one eye on her hand I take a deep breath. "Well, there is a story about a pelican…"

"Mmm," she says, the rest of her body relaxing, all except the hand.

"It was actually the first story my grandmother ever told me, that I remember. I had gone to visit her all by myself, and when she took me to the sea, as was her practice throughout my childhood, I was a naughty boy and fell in."

"Severus is never naughty," Lilly murmurs.

"On this occasion I was almost dragged off by the Sirens and my grandmother had all she could do to bring me back. When she had me shivering on the shore, she spirited me back to her house and wrapped me up in blankets just like you are now. And she said, 'Severus, you need to hear the story of the pelican, and mark my words.' And here is what she said:

"Once upon a time there was a pelican tending its young. Since pelicans are very egalitarian, you will not be surprised that this was a male pelican who is the subject of this story." I peer at Lilly with the sharp look my grandmother gave me to underline her point, and she giggles the way I did not on this occasion.

"You must keep in mind that these were difficult times for the bird kingdom. At some point some foolish bird had gotten it into its head that flying over the water was taboo. So for many, many centuries no birds flew over any body of water larger than a puddle. They thought there was some kind of dark magic in those bodies of flowing liquid, and they fancied this dark pull was trying to attract them into the depths. Which is a lot of nonsense—perhaps they had heard a thing or two about Sirens and other creatures of the deep, and instead of learning how to live with them, they avoided the sea altogether.

"Well, at some point some of the cleverer birds started to get curious. They could see the lovely silver fish leaping in the ocean from afar, but this silly prohibition kept them from exploring all the delights the depths have to offer.

"When some birds discovered that water was just as fine a place for creatures of the air as the earth is to fly over, they began venturing out more and more often across the watery realms. This unnerved the other birds to no end. They didn't like hearing stories of all these new things the water-birds—because that is what they were becoming—kept telling them about at the big conventions the bird kingdom holds every so often. Maybe they didn't like being shown for fools, who knows? But the fact is that a war broke out between the earth-fowl and the water-fowl, as they now called themselves.

"The earth-fowl organized a sort of blockade to keep their enemies from coming back to land. And thus there was a great flock of birds trapped on the seas.

"Unaccustomed to sharing so many of their fish with these creatures of the air, the whales and the dolphins and all other fish-eating creatures began to blame the water-fowl for making the fish supply grow scarce.

"And so, between their brethren the earth-birds and their new neighbors the sea creatures, the water-birds knew no rest.

"This particular pelican was guarding his young while his mate went off to look for food. Like all birds of his species, he could bob quite comfortably in the waves for a long time. But this was a very foolish pelican and he wasn't paying attention when he felt his toes grow warm and his nose grow cold.

"He was too busy kicking in the waves and letting his children ride on his back. Oh, playing games was his favorite thing to do!

"When the Siren swam right up next to him and said, "How do you do?" it was already too late. The pelican had let the Siren get the first word in.

"'Don't take my young, please,' the foolish pelican begged the Siren who was already starting to sing her hypnotizing song that would lure all that heard it into the deep to be her meal.

"The Siren merely smiled and swished her tail in a rude gesture.

"'Quick, quick,' the pelican said to his young. And he pierced his breast in five places so that each of the small birds could drink. 'Avenge my death!' he shouted above the swelling song of the Siren as it began to drag him away.

Once his young drank his blood, however, they were immune to the Siren's call. For pelican blood is one of the strongest elixirs known, if it is given freely by the bird. They quickly grew into fine, strong pelicans and when the time was right, they went out to where their father had perished. Pretending to lounge about with no purpose, these clever birds paid close attention to their noses and their toes, until finally all signs pointed to a Siren approaching from the west.

"'Hello, madam,' said all of the fierce pelicans in chorus.

"'Hello,' said the Siren, who was not against passing the time of day with someone who spoke first and thus was too intelligent to be her meal. 'Fine day isn't it?'

'A fine day to die!' screamed the pelicans as they tore at the Siren's flesh and pulled her from the ocean. As everyone who knows anything knows, a Siren can only survive for a very short time outside of water. Between the five of them they carried the creature through the air until she was thoroughly dried out and dead. Then they tore her into five different pieces and scattered her in the five temperate seas as a warning to her kind.

And their foolish father's death was avenged. The end."

"The end?" Lilly pipes up suddenly. "What kind of a story is that?"

"My grandmother's stories were always important survival lessons—or her idea of important, anyway." Actually, they were riddled with questionable magical advice and her views on pure blood, but if you can overlook that, they were very entertaining. "This was her way of telling me as a young boy about the perils of swimming unattended. I had almost been dragged off by the Siren, after all. Only because she was on such good terms with the Sirens and knew many of their secrets was she able to keep me from being their meal."

"Humph," Lilly says, fitting in that one syllable all that she thought about my grandmother.

Heartened by my friend's increasing calm, I try to keep her distracted. "Then maybe you will prefer my mother's version. She told it to me once when I was very young and she could still talk. I was sick with a terrible cough, and so she prepared a pelican for me and told me a story while it soothed my congestion.

"Once upon a time, there was a pelican who was caring for her young. This was a difficult time for water-fowl, and all fish-eating creatures, because the fish society was all up in arms over a scandal.

"At least, to them it was a scandal. The king of the fish had fallen in love with someone they didn't approve of. Some say it was a great she-bear who had been fishing at an inlet and spotted the handsome fish. Others say it was a majestic water bird like a heron. And still others say the fish fell in love with a woman. You'd think it would be nobody's business who he loved, but this was the king of the fish, and fish are like bees in that way. They don't know what to do with themselves without their sovereign at their head.

"So the fish were waging war with anyone they could find to fight, in an effort to get their king back to his kingdom again.

"They were so distracted, in fact, that there were very few fish left to eat. This had all of the fish-eating creatures of the deep pitted against each other. The whales versus the sharks against the dolphins.

"It was a very difficult time to raise a family, but this pelican and her mate were ever so proud of their five children, and they were determined to bring them up right. So the pelican family flew with their young in their great beaks far, far out into the middle of the ocean where no other creatures would bother them. They were ever so hungry, so the father pelican went to try and gather at the very least a mouthful of nutritious plankton or perhaps some seaweed to nibble on.

But he was gone a very long time, no doubt embroiled in one of the frequent squabbles with the other ocean-dwellers over a bite to eat. The children were crying so that the mother pelican was afraid they would die.

"'Here,' said the pelican, 'Peck my breast, each of you.'

They didn't want to, but she begged them to peck until finally they gave in. As each of her offspring pierced her breast, the mother whispered into their ear a special charm to say while their mouths were full of her blood.

And so, one by one, the little birds said their charms and they created—mackerel and haddock, trout and cod and tuna. Schools of these new fish burst into the sea out of nowhere, and the pelican family always had something to eat.

"At this point I was feeling well enough to ask my mother, 'What happened to the fish who was in love with the bear?'

"'Eventually the other fish got tired of being bothersome and made someone else their king. People always move on sooner or later,' she told me.

"'And the pelican mother. She didn't die?' I asked, remembering that things had gone differently in my grandmother's version.

"'No! Of course she didn't die. She gave them the gift of her knowledge, and since she did it with love, it created something wonderful. Just like I give my knowledge about magic to you.'

"'You know a spell for creating a fish! Teach me, please?' I begged my mother.

"She laughed and tousled my hair and said, 'I don't know of any such spell. But you're learning everything I know so fast you'll know more than me soon.' And then she added, 'Perhaps I could create a potion that would turn you into a fish for a short while.'

"'Really? I want to be a fish, mum, please!' and I fell asleep.

"This was right at the beginning of my mother's illness, so she had not yet begun to doubt her magic. When I was well again, my mother surprised me with a potion that would turn me into a fish for a short time. I loved the water from boyhood, and so you can imagine how excited I was to know what it was like to completely belong in the water.

"I was very sad when it didn't work. My mother took me down to the very edge of the sea and stood by me with a large phial of the potion so that I could have several goes at it. And nothing happened.

"She got the look on her face I was to see many times through the next several years—a desperate confusion where certainty had always been.

"Frustrated, my mother took a quaff from the phial herself. When she turned into a handsome silver fish and swam between my feet, it was almost as good as doing it myself.

"'Hurrah! Mum, it worked!' I shouted with my eye on the silver streak swimming through the waves. It swam and swam and I began to get worried when she didn't come back.

Finally a shape washed up on the shore. It was a large octopus, but I could tell by the frantic way it waved its tentacles that it was my mother.

"'Mum! Mum!' I shouted, frantic, my child's mind not sure if she would do better out of the water or in. Wrapping my arms around her I held her and cried. Suddenly I realized that what had been tentacles soothing my tears and tousling my hair a moment before, was now my mother again, wet and confused on the beach.

"I wish I could have told her that this one time it wasn't the fault of her wandering magic that I couldn't change into a fish. Perhaps she did realize before her mind started to go that there was something odd about my system that made transformative potions, in particular, not work correctly."

When I look at Lilly again, her hand has almost gone still. She sleeps. I consider notifying someone but it will just mean she has to get up, and I don't trust anyone to know what to do for her if I don't know myself.


	13. Chapter 13

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 13: The Bequest

_"Every experiment is like a weapon which should be used according to its specific function, as a spear is used to thrust, or a club to batter."_

_-Paracelsus_

Most of the night I spend chewing Silken Moonleaf because of the black taste in my mouth, but it's embarrassing how happy it makes me to have her in my bed.

It's also impossible to look away from the changes happening to her face. Some part of her that had not been in evidence before is pushing out from where it was hidden. She seems stronger in sleep, more determined. More Lilly.

I've dozed off in my chair when she wakes in the early hours of the morning. She has the covers wrapped around her but she is radiating alertness, and this strange energy is what wakes me as well.

"What was in that steam?" she asks, accepting the chocolate bar from my desk supply and the glass of water from my sink. "I feel marvelous."

"Somehow I don't think my remedy did anything other than settle what changes you were experiencing," I say. "Can you tell me?"

A wave of sorrow hits her and we both flinch. What she is about to tell me will hurt. I've never wished I could hold someone as badly as at that moment. All I can do is wait.

"Remember when I told you I don't have a familiar because I don't like seeing things caged up? Well that was only part of the truth.

"I've been listening to you tell me all about your life and I've not told you anything that might help you."

"Nothing will help me, my friend."

"I put out my cousin's eye when I was nine." Something shatters in the room. "It's torture for both of us at Christmas when we have to see each other.

"I've killed hedgehogs, birds, rabbits, mice.

"I like hurting things," she says in a tiny voice and bursts into tears.

It takes an effort to keep my face impassive while my mind is shouting, "No you don't. You're gifted at helping people." If the roles were reversed, she would remain neutral.

"How does it feel?"

"How does what feel?" The question takes her aback.

"When you kill the animals, how do you do it?"

"I just like shooting things, any kind of weapons. When I hurt my cousin I was knocking hedgehogs off a fence with a slingshot. All I've asked for as a Christmas present since I knew how to ask was for a gun." Her eyes shine. "I knew how to take one apart and clean one since I was very small, just from looking at pictures. My parents took me to several doctors when I kept finding ways to kill animals. They were going to put me in a special school before the Hogwarts letter came."

"Thank Hermès it did!" I burst out. "You know I was always terrified of being sent to such a place. Remember that's what I thought Hogwarts was."

She laughs and then sniffles. I hand her my handkerchief.

"You don't like to kill people, Lilly. I know because I do. I like draining their magic. It feels like nothing on earth and I'm powerful afterwards for days. Everything you just described was about the weapons themselves. You have a Bequest."

She twists her face up at what she sees as an attempt to make her feel better.

"No, really. Like my ability with potions, or like my aunt with languages. It's magical because you're a magical person, but it's not just that. You can be a great wizard or witch and not have a specific gift."

"So I'm good at putting out eyes. That's just grand." She balls her fists up against her head and grits her teeth. Once more I get the strong feeling that I can isolate the transformation she is going through from Lilly herself, and that she is fighting it.

"Here, take this salve and put it on your forehead and wand-hand. Sorry, I don't have a mirror in here, just roughly in the center will do. A little better?" She nods. "Now let me tell you another story.

"Way back when wizards and witches were the majority on the earth, magic was thick in the air. The line of magical wisdom stretched uninterrupted back to Hermes Trismegestus himself." She smiles, recognizing the first magician whose name I take in vain regularly.

"Everyone, from the smallest child on up, could cast very powerful spells with astonishing accuracy. Imagine a little child in a pram reaching for a parent's wand and conjuring its own food, or smiting a relative it didn't like right out of the room." She laughs, clearly picturing a tiny, furious Severus doing just such a thing.

"You can see the irony—in a world of adepts, there really wasn't such a thing as skill. Magic was something everyone just could do, regardless of whether they had the character for it.

"Then one day a young girl's parents began to worry about her development. As a child she was constantly banging on things. They worried that she was partially deaf, but this wasn't the case at all. The girl spent long hours by herself, though she had several siblings and a large extended family, just banging or plucking or blowing on things. The parents had been told she had some sort of tragic congenital condition, and being wizards, they naturally turned their attention to finding out who cursed their youngest child."

We share a bitter smile at the expense of Wizard Culture. Lilly's forehead is much smoother under the pink stripe of calming salve, I note.

"Gradually, without meaning to, the parents turned their attention to their children who could speak, and the young, nearly mute girl was left to her own devices in her room, which had the strangest collection of broken pots and hollow stalks and bits of string wound around nails."

A light comes into Lilly's eyes but she lets me continue.

"One day, long after they had stopped paying attention to the noises coming out of the girl's room, a stranger came to tea, or whatever beverage they favored at that time.

"What is that noise?" the visitor asked, entranced.

"Oh, that's our daughter. Sadly, she has a condition… We're sorry for the disturbance," her parents said, embarrassed.

"As if under a spell, the man got up from the table, his glass in one hand, the other reaching out as if it could touch the sounds coming from the room high up in the old house.

"He opened the door and found a half-wild girl making sounds that he could have sworn were being made by several people. The man sank to his knees and the girl stopped playing.

"'Don't stop, by Hermes, don't stop!' the man begged.

"The girl kept on plucking at the huge network of threads she had built up over the years, her foot tapping against a complicated little drum set made of pots, and occasionally drawing the most haunting tones from a set of reeds hung before her mouth.

"When she was finished the man wiped his tears and asked her, 'Why did you let them keep you up here? Why did you never tell them you were a musical genius?'

"The girl shrugged and said with a voice rusty from disuse, 'They wouldn't understand if I told them—and who wants to spend time with that bunch?'"

Lilly laughs.

"But wait, there's more. The man shook his head and said, 'What you have, my beauty (for he could see beyond the neglect to her beauty, just as he was able to hear her music for what it was) is a Bequest.'

"'What does that mean?' she asked, because there were a great many words she didn't know, being alone most of the time.

"'It means that there is something you must learn to Be, but in order to do that you must go on a Quest.' He stopped her before she could ask what a quest was. 'It means that what you are called to do is something new, something no one has ever thought of doing and yes, if you asked them they probably would tell you to stop. But it's very important that you go out into the world and learn to do it, and then you will find the people who can appreciate who you are."

"The man offered the girl his arm and they walked with great dignity down the winding staircase, though she was only wearing a nightdress and her hair was all tangled.

"The couple—for they were a couple, from that moment until they married and then until death—walked right through the parlor filled with the girl's small-minded relations, who gaped at them.

"'Where are you going?' her mother asked, meaning to ask the man where he was taking her handicapped daughter.

"'I have no idea!' the girl shouted in glee, and laughing fit to burst they ran out of the door and weren't heard from again.

"At least until her music became known far and wide under a new name."

"Olivia von Oilphant," Lilly finishes. "The Grandmother of Wizarding Musical Science."

"My Aunt Adele says that she really existed, and before she followed her Bequest, wizards could copy muggle music but had never thought to make any on their own."

I allow myself a glance at Lilly but try to keep her distracted while my other sense attempts to discern what is happening to her. "The real magic here is how you've managed to suppress this strain of magic for so many years," I say to Lilly, using my stove to make some tea. "A wise man once told me, 'The magic has to go somewhere,'" I recall the doctor shouting at me after my mother's death.

Lilly accepts the cup and drinks gratefully. "This tea tastes different. Is it your usual?" She picks up the tin, which is a half-finished container of my usual brew.

"Like it or not, Lilly Evans, you are a magical creature. That means you're not free to just decide to do something else. You have to do what you were called to do."

"You tell a good story, Severus," she says with a yawn. "It was actually uplifting, unlike everything else I've heard about your grandmother. I think I need to sleep some more."

That she leaves in much better shape than she arrived fills me with pride.

I don't tell her that when my grandmother told the story it was like all of her fairy tales—ghoulish and full of bloodshed. In her version Olivia slayed her entire family before she left. The music she was capable of making was too beautiful and it turned her husband mad in short order, and thus she had to be locked up in a tower from which she tossed down her sheet music, which had to be subjected to a sort of musical censorship so it wasn't excessively sublime to the point that it caused the end of civilization as we know it.

Grand-mère's tales were always good for a shiver, but she did tend to harp on extremes.

This version was told to me by my mother. Or rather, she placed it in my mind, image by image, because by that time she had lost the power of speech.

She was mostly lost in her own world by then as well, but that day when she took my hand as we flooed back from our visit to Grand-mére's house she noticed that I was upset.

She wouldn't let go of my hand and sat me down in the dingy parlor that was always such a shock when we came back from grandmother's stately old house. Looking at me with unusually clear eyes, my mother entered into my mind.

The whole confusing afternoon played out again for her benefit. Cousin Veronica and I were always getting into things we shouldn't, and nothing is more sacrosanct to a witch of a certain age than the vanity where she keeps her cosmetics and jewels.

Veronica had snuck past the wards and made herself up like a harlot, or that's what Grand-mére said when she gave her a smite across the hand that left a mark.

Naturally, I was curious about what was in this place that would incite such a reaction, so I stole up there one day and made quick work of the protective wards. Grandmother was good at conjuring but her security charms were child's play.

The jewels were mildly interesting because they were old, but I soon tired of pawing through those, and the unguents were all things I already knew how to make. The fragrances were something new, however. The idea of making something for no other purpose than that it had a pleasing smell was a novel concept for the serious-minded little potion apprentice that I was. And while the smells were nice, their magic was gorgeous—rich, shimmery magical colors made up the rather simple compounds that, as far as I could tell, were so pleasing because they were perfectly in balance.

Fascinated, I opened all of the stoppers and used some of the bottle caps to make new combinations. Though I had no training in mathematics, my mind could intuit some type of equation that dictated that as long as you put the right proportions of any selection of substances, they would turn into something worthy of being bottled in one of these crystal bottles.

My eyes were closed, sensing the natural properties of the oils and extracts, so I didn't notice Grand-mére's wand until it was already smiting me.

"Ow!" The bolt of magic she directed at me hurt so much the two bottles fell from my hands and shattered on the ground in a sweet-smelling cloud.

"That's what you get for meddling where you don't belong," my grandmother said fiercely. The second bolt both hurt and confused me. "And that's what you get for having unnatural inclinations in my house!"

"But, but it's very natural," I protested, the tears coming to my eyes against my will. "The mixtures, they—"

"There is nothing natural about a wizard messing about in a witch's boudoir!" Grand-mére yanked me by the hair and dragged me to the parlor where Veronica was losing in wizard chess to a bored Adele. I remember they looked up in anticipation of what gloriously naughty thing I had done to make the matriarch of our family so furious.

"If your grandfather was alive, you wouldn't be left to your own devices without a proper role model," she lamented, keeping one hand on my shoulder while with the other her wand searched for a book on one of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Obviously, my muggle father didn't figure into the equation at all.

"Aren't you and Aunt Adele good role models?" I asked in an attempt to ingratiate myself.

"No!" she wheeled on me and her wand was at my throat. "We're not wizards—this is what happens when a boy is only around witches and adopts their habits." The book was floating near my face and she thrust it under my nose.

from Histoire Véritable de Quatre lacopins. Geneva,1549.

They were woodcuts, pictures of men being burnt at the stake.

"I promise, I'll never play with your perfume again!" Though blubbering was not encouraged in the Laurent household, I was so confused it was making me hysterical. If only my mother would come in, but she was lying down having a rest in one of the empty bedrooms.

"Severus was playing like a girl!" Veronica at last captures the gist of my offense, and then I feel very ashamed and yet at the same time, relieved. If that's a capital offense, I know how to avoid it.

Adele's eyes merely telegraphed the message they always held for me: "Thrive off the hatred."

Once the whole memory had been replayed, sitting in our parlor, my silent mother stroked my hair and transmitted the story about the Bequest into my disquieted mind. Knowing that she understood why the little bottles were so interesting made my grandmother seem foolish, and me feel special. We played at making these magic proportions on the rare occasions that my mother was aware of her surroundings.

"Grand-mère is so frightening sometimes," I whispered to my mother. "Was your father this way, too?"

My mother shakes her head vehemently and places a whole series of images in my mind: a gentle, abstracted man who I knew worked at the ministry, but it turns out that he worked with the magical animals research section in particular. He used to bring the girls in when a rare species had been brought to his laboratory and describe the beast's special properties.

In my mother's memory he was so quiet that she never got to know him until she advanced in her potions science to the extent that she began creating transformative compounds, specifically a sort of interspecies Polyjuice that was one of her great achievements.

The first time she happened to surprise her father at the office transfigured as a Borneo Bearcub, she was surprised to find him so friendly. He spoke to her and played with her in a way she didn't remember him doing otherwise. When her potion wore off and he discovered his daughter in one of the cages, it became their secret way to bridge the great gap that existed for some reason between this man and other people.

My mother showed me many pranks she played on her father by surprising him in various forms until he was killed in a mishap with a dragon, but something didn't make sense to me.

"Your father seems so—different—than grand-mère."

My mother nods and gets a mischievous look. She shows me another image—the way she came to see her mother through her father's eyes: a strange and fascinating species worthy of further scientific study.

From then on that's how I try to look at my grandmother as well, but it's difficult with such an imposing personage.

When I first began to seek my own forbidden inclinations in the Forbidden Section of the library, this most distressing memory of my grandmother came back to me. I finally understand that the unfortunate men in the woodcuts were being burned alive, not for wearing perfume or acting like women, but for seeking out other men. At first, such a fate seemed to have no more to do with me than the men pictured wedding their brooms. An old wives' tale, good for an impersonal shiver. Then, for a short period of time, I thought it a depiction of an outmoded savagery that no one could possibly take seriously anymore. Not anyone who knew love.

With the revelation of my deadly sexuality, the idea of getting into a great deal of trouble because of love doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore.

It makes me grateful that I can still feel something for someone, and yet have no fear of acting upon those feelings. Lilly is this thin petal holding back the void. It pains me that she has been carrying around all of this self-hatred when I could have been helping her—she, who wasn't created a monster, it's not too late for her.

That night I head into a disused wing of the castle until I find a neglected room I happened across in my nighttime wanderings a year ago.

On my way back from my errand I stop by the library, where Miss Bundle is still awake. She gives me a nod and returns to her reading. After about half an hour I emerge from the Restricted Section, frustrated.

"I can't seem to find it anywhere," I say to the librarian. "Could it be that the Restricted Section has all of the worst of Wizarding sexual peccadilloes and yet lacks mention of homosexual wizards being burned at the stake?"

She barks a short laugh. "Where do you get your information, Snape? Perhaps such a thing has happened from time to time among the muggles, but it has never been documented in our kind."

"But my grandmother showed me a picture," I protest, and use my poor drawing skills to render a version of the woodcut.

"Oh, that," Bundle says dismissively and summons a book from the "History of Magical Society" section.

That she knows exactly what book and exactly what page frightens me a little. Has she really slept with that much of the library by now?

"You see, those blokes were being burned at the stake all right, but it was for less pleasurable crimes. It was some faction who, many centuries ago, got it in their heads that goblins were the master race or some nonsense. They sought to overthrow not only a specific ministry regime, which is a time-honored pursuit and thus doesn't usually warrant such a punishment, but they wanted to sign over all of humankind to this very persuasive goblin king who would rule as a sort of benevolent dictator protecting us from the worst of our humanity. A much larger threat, you must agree, given that goblin magic is so different than ours it might take centuries for witches and wizards to find a loophole to such an agreement."

The woodcut my grandmother frightened me with as a child is trembling in my sixteen-year-old hand. My fury isn't directed at my grandmother, who I've always had a hard time reproaching for being the product of another time, but at my easy-to-hate aunt. All those afternoons spent learning about the witches and wizards who had discovered the most obscure things, like some useless theory behind a now-abandoned way to make wands!

She could have at least spent a few moments correcting the erroneous history lesson she saw my grandmother smite into me that afternoon. She could have said it in any language and it would have meant a lot: "Oh, by the way, Severus, should it ever come up, homosexuality is not now, nor has it ever been, a capital offense in wizard society."

"That bitch," is all I can manage to say, because my anger is mounting to such proportions that the books are rattling on the shelves.

"Watch it!" Miss Bundle smites me with her wand and grabs the book that I release into her other hand. "Look at that, you singed the binding. Get out of here. Go to bed." She cradles the book in her arms and I return to my room, only remembering the reason for my wanderings when I feel its weight in my pocket while undressing for bed.

When I put the dagger in her hand the next day, Lilly's entire being lights up. She doesn't ask me to find out that it came from a disused armory, and that I sharpened it myself with chemical means.

"Throw it at me."

She doesn't have to be asked twice. The blade pings off my shield.

Lilly jumps up and down and claps her hands.

We start slow in one of the disused training spaces in the basement, with me leading her through a series of concentration exercises to make her at one with the blade. It's the same principle as working with a new potions ingredient: I have her get to know the weapon first using her wand-hand and then her supporter-hand. Where I would experiment to see how a new ingredient reacted with different substances, Lilly pays attention to her own reaction to the blade. She carries it with her for an entire day to sense how her awareness of the item changes in different circumstances.

Within no time Lilly is throwing with the weight balanced so the iron sings in the air. Then she stops.

"What are we doing this for? There's no role for witches in war."

"On the contrary, there is a long and illustrious history. My great-great-great aunt was a war heroine. She led her own regiment in the goblin wars and only died when she was knocked off her broom and into a lake by a goblin curse."

"My illustrious ancestor did such-and-such," Lilly retorts, mocking the "I'm from an Old Family" trait she often faults me with, when all I wanted to do was find an example to let her know that she can be a warrior if she likes.

It seems she is not entirely integrated with her new ability.

While Lilly stalks off I'm finally able to place the "red" that the Red Active solution she took to so well was interacting with. It's a red, martial streak that my friend has denied in herself up until now. She remains a Blue to my inner sense, but when I think of the person who was just throwing a dagger at me, the force propelling the weapon was red. It's all beyond my comprehension, but still I know what I must do.

That weekend I take an excursion to Diagon Alley. Basically any potion I put my hands to far outclasses anything the potions purveyors sell, so I can fetch a handsome profit if I can get the ingredients together to make something with a good market value. There are the usual skin salves and headache remedies based upon my mother's recipes, which have developed a following over the years. Polyjuice is always a big-ticket item when I can scrape together the makings for it, and this time I'm bringing my entire store of the stuff shrunken in my bag. There's also a very mild variation of Miss Bundle's Liber Lactis Lotion I've started marketing as a study aid and is in great demand. Once all of these preparations have been sold, there is a substantial sum in my pocket.

It caught my attention months ago in the curio shop, but I had no idea at the time that it would prove significant.

What drew my eye was the combination of the lapis lazuli inlay and the fleur de lis pattern. Lilly's magical color and her flower! I thought, forgetting about the dagger in an instant. What use could she possibly have for such a thing?

The curio vender and I haggle good-naturedly but we both know there is no market for knives and other muggle-like weapons anymore. "Hope you're going to give it a good home," he says, wrapping it in a piece of blue velvet. "It's a handsome piece and deserves better than gathering dust."

"I think it is going to make someone very happy," I assure him, handing over almost all of my potions earnings.

When Lilly won't make eye contact with me at lunch I see, as expected, that she realizes she behaved badly and doesn't want to admit it. I leave a Fragmented letter for her as I walk out.

"What's this all about?" she asks me after dinner, having obeyed the note's request that we meet in my room. Her eye is drawn to the unusual blue on my desk.

"Look and see."

Her mouth opens and closes several times as she unwraps it.

Thank Hermès for my shield, or she'd have run me through with the damn thing while hugging me—I'm not sure which of those would have been worse.

"Oh, Severus!" she's squealing over and over.

She cuts her finger.

I hand her the bandages and disinfectant from where they were at the ready next to the sword. "Careful, it's sharp," I drawl.

"Oooh, you," she says and throws it in the air and catches it like she'd been doing it all her life. "It's perfectly balanced. It's beautiful! But, I've never given you a present. What do you give a potions adept?"

"You can never go wrong with Drowsing Worm. Every part is useful."

She blows me a kiss and carries out her gift swaddled in the velvet wrap like a baby.

She's going to need weapons holsters, a satchel for Whetstone Salve to keep her knives sharp…

Maybe I'll give her a present every week to be able to see that look in her eye.

We definitively give the support group over to new leadership. All Lilly wants to do is train. It's like seeing someone who has been in a desert drinking water compulsively. This part of herself, now that it has been let out, has a voracious need and I want to help her. Also, I have no great love for martial weapons and so I keep an arsenal of my weapons—potions—to help her should she injure herself.

Lilly throws all manner of dangerous items at me, and after she complains that it makes her feel like she's missing the mark when the dagger or projectile bounces off the shield, I arrange it so she can see a small burst of light. This delights her and I can see why her family thought she had violent tendencies if she had this reaction when hitting a squirrel in the head with a rock. Nevertheless, what this unassuming-looking girl truly likes to do is hit targets. She takes great pleasure in accomplishing difficult feats of skill, but she doesn't miss the possibility of hurting someone that doesn't exist with me.


	14. Chapter 14

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 14: The Grungerford Case

One day I feel someone coming to our practice space. The door is always open to prevent any suspicion of untoward behavior, but I knew someone would come to investigate sooner or later.

Dumbledore, the man himself, stands in the doorway that day while I'm throwing a series of daggers at Lilly and she's trying to catch them. She gets all but one, the last one falling to the ground because she notices him there.

"Most impressive, Ms. Evans," he says in a way that makes it sound like bad news.

Lilly and I scowl as one and he raises an eyebrow.

"Would you both be so good as to accompany me to my office?" he says. This doesn't feel like a friendly "let's eat sugary things while I make cryptic comments" sort of invitation. Lilly slips her robe over her practice clothes and we gather up the knives to accompany the headmaster.

"_I won't let him separate us," _Lilly thinks in the communications method that has become habitual for us.

_He has no reason to. It's not like we were throwing weapons around naked._

She snorts and Dumbledore contemplates us for a moment before letting us in to his chamber.

A man stands up and bows. "Ms. Evans, I have been anxious to make your acquaintance," he says. "I'm Drew Thurlock from the Ministry," he smiles, taking her hand in his.

I hate him.

His eyes slide halfway towards me—his only acknowledgement of my presence—as he turns back to Dumbledore. "Have you told her anything?" He is eager. That much I can tell from his voice.

He is also extremely anxious to get out of any room with me in it.

So the ministry does know about me. I always thought they must—Dumbledore has his fingers in every pie here at school, so it stands to reason that he would meddle in business outside the grounds.

"No, Mr. Thurlock, as I am not sure what your interest is in my students, I wouldn't dare try to express it."

Lilly and I steal a glance. Dumbledore is actually angry. At someone other than us!

"Well, Ms. Evans, perhaps you could tell me just how your sudden interest in weapons developed?"

Lilly repeats the story we've cooked up for the inevitable questions that would come our way. She makes no mention of her childhood and claims it happened to her in Defense of the Dark Arts class when she handled a dagger for the first time.

"Remarkable." Thurlock's eyes are shining. "For a Bequest to remain dormant so long and appear, fully formed, as it were, at her age!"

"Severus possesses many talents as well," Dumbledore points out, "But while my students are my students, they are free to explore any subject matter that interests them without having to justify it or apply it in any way."

We're shooting each other a barrage of unanswerable questions while maintaining our disinterested faces.

"When it is a matter of state security, we do intervene where and when we like," Thurlock says without losing his smile. "Tell me, Lilly, may I call you Lilly? Have you had any dreams?"

"Dreams? I dream of classes and professors, of course. And my family, and Severus, he's there almost every night." This brings a knot to my throat, but then I can't resist smiling when Thurlock looks disgusted. "Sometimes I dream of being a bird. I like transfiguration."

"Hmm, yes, well, please promise me one thing, Lilly?" She gives her best good-girl attentive look. "Let me know if you do have any dreams that seem—significant." He floats a card over to her and she takes it without the slightest sign of being impressed. She hands it to me and I study it.

"Severus, what about you?" Dumbledore asks, and I can't tell if it's for fairness' sake or if he's really interested.

"I dream of the sea very often. Sometimes it's the coast of France. Occasionally I dream of my mother."

The ministry official pales and tugs at his collar. He stands up. "Well, all of you please keep me in mind if anything occurs to you that is at all related to Ms. Evans' prodigious talents." He flashes what he thinks is an irresistible smile.

The impropriety that Lilly thinks at me has me guffawing as the man leaves.

"Prodigious talents" will become Lilly's and my new euphemism for naughty bits.

When the official is finally gone, Dumbledore offers us anything we like out of his sweet cabinet but we just watch him load his hands with all sorts of treats.

"Those ministry chaps leave me with a bad taste in my mouth every time," he explains, biting into a chocolate frog. "I don't for a moment believe that two teenagers are capable of telling everything to an adult if they tried, but I trust you both enough to think that you will tell me if anything significant occurs to you."

"Yes headmaster." "Of course, sir."

"And Severus?" I turn back from the door we're about to exit through. "Very good work."

Lilly has to smite me with her wand to make me stop cursing all the way back to my room.

"What is his pathology that makes him claim things that have nothing to do with him as his idea?" I'm bubbling with anger at the meaning I know was behind his last remark—that somehow I helped Lilly integrate this part of herself.

"Severus, he's leaving us alone, and that's all that matters." She strokes my hair and it makes me tremble.

That night I dream of battlefields. As does Lilly. We have done almost every night since she started practicing with knives.

We develop our own symbols for a type of magical wargame made up from fragments of our shared dreams, except it doesn't feel like a game. We are absolutely serious when we sit in class and exchange ideas for the next move—how can I protect the water supply from being poisoned? How can she outmaneuver the enemy general? How can we both escape in the middle of the night with ten strong wizards and witches surrounding the room where we're hiding?

And then just as suddenly, it will be over. We're sullen teenagers again.

_"Do you think the ministry fellow was right and we're really being prepared for a battle?"_

_I don't know. It certainly feels like we're being prepared for something, but I could have just as easily said that when we were leading the group together and I was making healing salves._

Lilly can sense my worry that our private world will be destroyed by adult concerns. She ghosts her hand near my arm.

_"It will always just be us, Severus. No one can reach us here. Whatever we must do, we must, but all that matters to me is that it's you and me running from an angry mob."_

_You say the sweetest things, ma petite._

She treats me to an insouciant look over her shoulder, which has gotten ten times as irresistible since I learned she has the will and skill to slit my throat in my sleep.

-

"_We have to tell someone," _Lilly says to me one morning over breakfast. I don't need to look up from my usual close study of my tea to register that she has had an especially bad nightmare. I myself dreamt about Hogwarts being divided against itself by some characteristic only I could discern. I stood there telling the warriors on my side who to execute and who to spare for what felt like hours until I woke up.

_I know. Perhaps the Ministry really has reformed under Minister Bailywick._

She gives her soft-boiled egg a savage tap and watches the yolk run out before pushing it away.

_"I can't risk that, and neither can you," _she says to my mind, her face gone pale.

The famous Grungerford case was only about two years prior, and no one in the magical world has forgotten about it one jot. Emily Grungerford had witnessed a murder: a neighbor performed an Unforgivable on a rival whom she suspected of swindling her out of a large sum of money. Grungerford just happened to be transfigured into a bird at the time and was flying over when it happened.

There was already a well-established precedent for admitting the testimony of witnesses who were not in a human form at the time of an incident, so that wasn't the problem. It should have been an open-and-shut case.

But the neighbor, Brigitte Thorlis, knew that the other woman indulged in some forbidden magics—sex magic, to be specific, and in a variety of constellations that included groups. Sex magic has led many a wizard or witch astray, and the huge amounts of energy it summons means that anything that goes wrong, goes very wrong. And yet, the most novice magician can stumble upon some of the simplest formulas in the course of ordinary, well, intercourse. The sheer accessibility of this volatile power has created a powerful taboo around it.

Except it appears that Grungerford was one of the minority—she was experimenting with using the power for healing, and she observed strict precautions like medical screenings before calling on the Moon and a few other ancient sources of power.

The message the majority of the Wizarding world learned from the incident was that pointing the finger at someone can get you in big trouble—worse trouble than the person you brought to the attention of the ministry. Their scrutiny knows no bounds. To this day, Brigitte Thorlis is a free witch, and Emily Grungerford died in Azkaban after seeing her family subjected to the worst publicity and interrogation imaginable, with several of them losing their livelihoods after their own Earth Magic—of a nonsexual nature—was revealed.

What I learned from reading the news articles, written in especially salacious prose by the Prophet's finest muckrakers, was that the wizarding world sinks or swims together. We're a small, backward-looking people, for whom history deserves unquestioning loyalty because it has bequeathed us with great power. That Grungerford was universally liked and respected as a rare game keeper, and Thorlis was widely despised because of her habit of using necromancers to seek out antiques for her dealership—didn't matter at all. Once someone revived the specter of an admittedly dark period in wizarding history when people were widely Stunned into orgies against their will, there were simply no cooler heads to be found to save the woman who witnessed a murder in cold blood and brought it to the attention of the authorities.

(A thought takes years to form in my mind—that if it ever got out that my earlier sexual activities occasionally involved groups, I might have suffered a similar fate as Grungerford. And perhaps Dumbledore had his hands full diverting that disaster and thus not much attention available for soothing my hurt feelings when it all came to light).

For a relatively lawless bunch—and wizards and witches are notorious for breaking the very rules they create—magical society defends its code of ethics as stoutly as a sinner at mass on Sunday, as my father would say.

Lilly is afraid of them—the ministry or the muckrakers—finding the so-called violent tendencies in her past and locking her away as a psychopath.

But me in the public eye… I would fare worse.

_It is not for nothing that you are a warrior and I am a very crafty monster; we will think of something, mon fleur-de-lis._

_"Meet me after last class in the forest, you know where," she says, wolfing down a muffin._

_-_

"All we need to do is get the information to the Ministry without it being traced to us," she says later on, knowing full well that this is a tall order.

"We can't do it on our own," I say, shielding my emotions like mad.

"What's the point of trying to remain anonymous if we start telling people we think there's going to be another war?" she scoffs.

"I'm suggesting we tell one other person under controlled circumstances. Someone who can help us with the technical difficulties." She's looking at me incredulously. "There's really only one person who would know how to do it. James Potter," I finish smoothly, relatively assured that she doesn't hear the pain I feel at saying his name.

"He'll never agree to help any project associated with you," she says very gently.

"I think you can convince him that this is for the greater good, and I can engineer a little forgetfulness."

-

Overcoming my distaste for invisibility, I take a good dose of a strong potion for just that purpose and follow Lilly into the Astronomy Tower. She's toying with her knife, the one with the lapis lazuli hilt, throwing it up in the air and spinning it in her palm.

Shortly, James emerges from his invisibility cloak and for one exhilarating moment I think we're back in time and he's going to kiss me. Instead, he looks worn and sullen as he mumbles a greeting to Lilly. Then he flinches, looking all around.

The magic that I stole from him is resonating with that which is still in his body.

Like two fireflies they ignite—orange to orange—signaling their kinship. A haunted look spreads over his face and then his eyes go empty.

"Thank you so much for meeting me," Lilly says, settling her cloak a little. The vapors that I have saturated her hair and clothes with seem to be calming James down very quickly. Lilly has taken the antidote and her mind is as sharp as her dagger.

He's only given a single glance to her knife since approaching her, and I can tell it doesn't occur to him that it's a live blade.

_Foolish wizard, you could have cut his throat five times over by now._

_"Shush." _

"The only reason I came, well, it was for two reasons," James states in a voice that is a mere shadow of the one I remember. "Number one, he's queer. He's bent as a Dromedary Moose, so if you think you can change that, you're wrong. Number two, no matter how many pretty things he says to you, no matter how good he makes you feel, you'll be dead all the same, and he'll be walking around like nothing's happened."

"James, I really didn't ask you here to—"

"No, I think you have a right to know. I had an enlarged heart, malformed blood cells, shadows in my brain. Yes, they took me to a muggle doctor and he said it looked like I'd been poisoned, starved and given a bad case of the bends, but they couldn't find from what. I knew exactly what was wrong, but what I was surprised to find out was that I was days from death."

Lilly is back in her listening mode from the support group, and she sits very still.

"How many days away from death do you think you are, if you've let him lay so much as a hand on you? And from the way you look at him I can tell it's only a matter of time if you haven't. It's not worth it Lilly," here his voice softens. "Especially for you. No matter what you do for him he can't love you, he's just a—"

Here he utters a stream of invective so vicious my heart skips several beats. Lilly goes white. I can tell from the emotions rolling off her that it's from anger—that and from her hand closing on the knife hilt.

"Sorry, Miss Evans," He attributes her expression to shock. "I just wanted you to know, to save you if I could from paying such a high price for nothing."

The James I knew so little is noble after all.

Lilly's eyes narrow and I think she's going to slit out his tongue.

"How would you like to save many people?" she asks.

_Brilliant segue, you wily minx._

_"Shut up,"_ she thinks warmly.

"What do you mean? Does he have his hooks in a lot of girls?" James asks in alarm.

"No, Potter, I asked you here because I need your help breaking into the ministry and I thought you'd be game for it. Perhaps I was wrong—you must be very busy—"

_"Spreading lies and rumors about my friend."_

"Wait, you said break into the ministry, as in, find our way in during the middle of the night? Whatever for? I can't imagine anything worth risking Azkaban, sorry, Evans."

"I don't want you to actually physically break in, I need you to get a message to them. A message that can't be traced to me."

He looks suspicious. "What sort of message? Can't you just post a letter written with one of those quills that Confund your handwriting? They're not all that stable, but I could probably improve it for you."

"Grungerford," Lilly says simply, and her voice rings true. "I need to tell the ministry about something that might affect public safety, but I can't risk my well-being or that of my family."

_"Or my Severus." _

My delight at this thought is quickly hidden from her.

James is nodding. "Yes, yes, there is that. I see. Are you going to tell me what this message is?"

"Certainly," she says in her most cheerful voice. "As soon as you take the Unbreakable Vow."

He starts. "This is really serious, isn't it?"

"Yes it is," she says in a voice tinged by nightmare.

"This is going to be ripping!" he bursts out. "Their information systems are way behind the times but still incredibly complex—all the more so because no one, either by design or accident, knows every bit of how it works." He realizes Lilly is looking at him inquiringly. "My father works at the ministry. At something classified, so it's not that he's given any state secrets away, it's just that I have a mind for this sort of magic, and I've pieced together some things on my own."

"So you'll do it, then?" she inquires neutrally. When he nods excitedly, she withdraws her wand with a slow movement. "Then you'll swear not to reveal this enterprise, the fact that I have something to tell, what I tell you or even that we've had this conversation, to anyone?"

His wand is out in a moment. "This is too big a challenge to pass up. Yes! I swear!"

They perform the ancient rite of the Unbreakable Vow, and it's all I can do to swallow my anguish. He's touching her! James, this young man with no deadly condition, is touching her!

What's it to me? Can I claim I would touch her if I could?

When they are done Lilly adds, as we planned, "We'll pay you, of course," except she shouldn't have used the plural.

"Who's we?" he asks, a hard look on his handsome features again.

"Surely you don't think I'm the only one," she says, so easily she might have planned it all along. "Many people have had these dreams—dreams of war." This has an impact on him. "Do you forget who I am? The only student to start a support group that Dumbledore himself is not allowed into without permission. People tell me things. And they expect their secrets kept."

The young man relaxes a little and then says, "Then you won't mind taking the Unbreakable Vow that you won't discuss any of this with him, nothing I've said to you tonight." He holds his wand at the ready, ostensibly for the spell, but I'm ready to launch myself between them he looks so threatening.

"Swear to me," he says in a black voice.

Lilly puts her wand back into position.

"I do swear that—. Oh, bollocks, never mind. I'd have to say his name for it to work. I swore never to do that," James mutters, lowering his wand. Then he grabs Lilly's hand. "Promise me you'll think about it, that you'll consider what I said and save yourself from him before it's too late." He searches out her eyes and pins them with a gaze so desperate I have to look away.

"This is about something much bigger than broken hearts," Lilly replies, and the look on his face is just priceless as we leave him in the Tower.

"Would you have sworn?" I ask her after I've taken the antidote to the invisibility potion and am giving her the pelican treatment with some of her favorite vapors to wash off the calming agents I soaked her with earlier. We've discovered that there are certain compounds that bring her a physical as well as mental pleasure. For me they are bittersweet, because I can see her muscles coming unknotted, her limbs melting into the coverlet, the serene planes of her face, and know that I brought her this feeling with my art, but can never do so with my hands.

Why do I keep thinking that? I wouldn't know what to do with a girl if I tried.

She stretches herself out like a cat and I have to look away so she doesn't see the conflict I myself don't understand.

"It's not like I need to tell you what we discussed because you were there, but it might have been tricky in the long run," she acknowledges about James' demand she take the Vow.

"We could have found a cat or another creature not likely to tell the secret, and transferred the vow to it. The spell is not at all secure, but it might run some risk to the cat."

"Cats can't talk," she says in her most feline posture.

"For their sake I hope not," I murmur, thinking of the price the poor animal would pay.

She looks up from her relaxed pose on my bed. Sometimes she reminds me of the way the girls used to treat me in the MAHBUS group. They would joke around very freely and slouch and ask me advice about men as if I were barely one myself. No one enjoys being a pet, and no matter what becomes of us I wish this girl wouldn't throw herself around my bed as if I am made of stone and can't see and feel her charms.

_"You're upset."_

_Yes._

What's the use of denying it? She's too sensitive.

_"I know that was hard for you, but you were very brave. You can see now that James is a limited person—he has to blame you for something, he's not sure what, or he wouldn't know how to go on at this point in his life. I'm sorry that it brings back all your feelings for him, though. It looks like he will have some interesting ideas for our problem, at least._

It seems better that I don't correct her about the reason for my emotions, that I don't let her in to the heart of my torment.

It's hate that I feel. Not love denied.

What James thinks of me is hurtful but so are many things in my life.

I hate that he touched her.

The fury forces me out into the Forest at night, only vaguely aware of the light rain that pricks at my face with the only touch allowed me. The graceful, knife-wielding hand that I am not allowed to touch, the arm I can't stroke when she's sitting beside me at mealtimes or when we're studying, and she's upset or frightened or happy. Just grant me the right that any thoughtless boy student has to run his fingers across her palm when he passes her a parchment in class.

But what would I do? This is madness. I've never so much as looked at a girl before Lilly, and when we spent all of our time together running the group it was without my thinking she had a body.

Perhaps it's not her, perhaps it's James after all, but something has my desire throbbing between my legs.

"What is it? What do you want from me?" I shout at my sex in the dark.

I end up rolling around in misery and need until the mud draws it all out of me, sob by sob, spasm by spasm.

When my cursed strength has been poured into the earth, which hasn't yet figured out a way to deny my kinship with it, my mind thinks with the complete clarity that seems to come with despair. The sky is like a black crystal overhead, tainted by the memory of light that is the cluster of stars trapped within it forever. I think, as I have many times since I realized I loved Lilly, that I should just go away. Pack a bag with a few ingredients and the necessary equipment to start again as a potion master anywhere in the world but here. Why do I stay, when Hogwarts can't teach me any of the things I want to learn?

There are thousands of things I want to know about magic, about the inner workings of potions science, but there are three basic questions that, until I can answer them, mean I will be muddling about in the world like a blind man with a blunderbuss.

What does my condition mean?

Is there any way to make it more bearable?

Would I deserve love if it weren't forbidden me?

But I can't leave Lilly. Not now. She'd call forsaking our destiny together—one that becomes more tangible and deeply rooted every day—an act of cowardice. And hers is the only opinion I care about.

Suddenly I look up—several nocturnal birds, including some handsome owls, are watching me. Lilly and I come out to the forest more frequently than other students because the school oppresses us, and the animals sometimes come out to greet us, or inspect us, or whatever they think about the two surly students come to complain about their lives.

The awful thought comes to me that Lilly has transfigured into an owl and has watched this whole sorry exercise. Did I call out her name when I emptied myself into the mud? Could any woman on earth take that as a compliment?

_"Oh, Severus, it moves me to see you invoke my name as you wallow like a pig in your own lust and self-pity. You're the lover I've been saving myself for."_

My laugh strikes like a pebble against the perfect black skin that is the silent night in the forest. The birds fly away.

I settle my clothes and return to the castle, spending the rest of my sleepless night trying to think of ways to determine whether Lilly was out of her bed that night and on a branch in the forest.

-

"It's lucky you didn't come with me," Lilly says breathlessly after her next meeting with James. "He cast some sort of spell that I've never heard before, but he looked around the room very carefully before he started talking."

"Did he have any good ideas?" I say to distract from the discomfort brought on by his realizing that I was in the room the first time. Does he think this is all a way to get close to him again?

She laughs and shakes her head. "He had _lots_ of good ideas. First he asked why we didn't just leak the information to the _Daily Prophet_ and let the Ministry try to sort fact from fiction, but as we discussed, the idea of getting those parasites at the _Prophet_ after us and potentially my family is not a possibility." Lilly pales at the thought, as she had when we discarded the idea from the outset.

"He had a lot of other ideas—infiltrating the ministry under Polyjuice and starting rumors, creating false memoranda, or something as simple as anonymous letters sent from overseas in a way that couldn't be traced to us, but by far the best idea is using the _Prophet_."

"But, you know that those animals from the newspaper wouldn't let you or your family go until they'd manufactured every disgusting falsehood that popped into their vapid heads," I rejoin, thinking that they would also very much enjoy to learn about me and my peculiarities.

"That's not what I meant," she says, smiling eagerly, "We're going to use the printed newspaper after it is in transit to the ministry workers, make a few additions using James' magic, and let these employees gradually absorb the idea of a threat over their morning tea."

"Something that advanced would get traced to James sooner or later," I object. "There are probably only a few wizards in Britain that have his skill with information spells."

She beams at me. "The information will disappear after they read it." We stare at each other, thinking of that brilliant detail about the Fragmentus spell I taught her. We could never fathom how the parchment would know when someone had read it—very advanced charms indeed.

I burst out laughing and she joins me. "Genius," we say at the same time and laugh again.

"He can really do this?" I ask, but I know full well he can.

"Yes. And it's perfect. We want this to be subtle. A news item that you remember reading recently but can't remember the day."

It will be about our nightmares and daytime visions. Something about an army bursting from the earth itself, the water supply at risk, weapons that are a mix between muggle and wizard technology, and worst of all a kind of fire that seeks out all the people of a certain lineage—all the muggles in one place, all the wizards in another, designed to turn people against each other and create differing ideas of who might be in league with the enemy.

"The trick is, he needs us to figure out how to target each of the ministers," she continues. "His Fragmentus spell uses a similar technology as Polyjuice—he's thinking of keying the spell to their signature using something like a hair or article of clothing that will then be activated on certain days when it comes in contact with the newspaper."

"James is being very generous to take all this trouble, but the idea of going through a ministry worker's trash does not appeal to me at all," I object. I can brew top-quality Polyjuice but my system seems to have an immunity to it just like alcohol. Without any way to transfigure or change my features, my distinctive appearance is bound to be noticed, and I would never make Lilly take all the risk.

We argue about it for a while, when I sit up so quickly I knock the Simpersaw seeds we've been degranulating off my lap.

"This can be very simple. Why don't we find something that the ministry employees—and only they—touch? I can devise a potion that is invisible to anyone but someone who knows to look for it, and James can key the spell to anyone who has come in contact with this substance all at once."

Lilly kisses my shield in the general direction of my cheek.

"Genius," she says, and I draw my shield around my mind so she can't sense my infantile pleasure at her approval.

Since James must know who it is who would be engineering this substance, my involvement in the project becomes a price he will pay for the most complicated and daring spell he's ever attempted. Up until now, I'd suspected he was behind pranks like making every student's quill and professor's chalk write "Huzzah for Dumbledore" on the exact hour and day of the Headmaster's birth, but, as many have discovered, there is nothing like putting something at stake to make the creative juices flow. Azkaban does nicely.

I take my invisibility potion again and hover at the far end of the Astronomy tower where Lilly and James are to meet. The magic I stole from him resonates within him like a shot, but he gradually calms as he senses I am keeping my distance.

"So, Evans, are you going to cut off locks of the ministers' hair with that dagger of yours?" he asks.

"I thought of cutting off their pinky fingers and handing them to you on a platter, but that seemed to lack the subtlety we're going for in this operation," she says drily.

James laughs gaily. "Ministry workers are all warded against those old-timey dagger spells anyway."

Lilly and I share another laugh at his wizardly superiority about muggle weapons.

_"Perhaps I should punch him in the nose to remind him that my wand-hand is good for something other than casting."_

_Head in the game, mon fleur._

When after several minutes I make no move to speak, he is able to push me from his mind entirely—something he has developed a great skill for.

"It's all very simple, you see," Lilly says and gets the reaction she was expecting—James' pride starts to raise its hackles.

"There's nothing simple about my spells."

_"He sounds like you when I asked you once why you don't just throw in the potion ingredients whole instead of chopping them up first."_

A breath from my end of the tower is the remnant of a snort.

Lilly explains our idea—

_"Your idea"_

-to James, who quickly forgets about his little snit and is practically jumping around the tower.

"Of course! That's brill-" He stops himself in time. "That will do very nicely," he finishes, all business.

And directing himself only to the grinning Lilly, he tells her his specifications for the easiest substances to track—ones that would be stand out sharply among all the other signatures in Wizarding Britain, but wouldn't cling to the delivery object for too long so as to minimize the possibility for the wrong person touching it, or for too wide an exposure that might cause panic.

_Ask him what area he had in mind—what thing ministry employees would touch._

"What would this object be, Potter? It's best if it's something we can set it up without alarming suspicion."

He looks surprised for a moment. "Oh, I forget not everyone at Hogwarts has a relative who works at the ministry," he says. Lilly gets that scowl that appears whenever she senses a slight against her muggle background. "I didn't mean anything by it, Evans, it's just that there are several ways into the ministry, the most disgusting one being—" He whispers something I can't hear.

"Oh!"

_What is it?_

_"Toilets. They—"_

While Lilly is describing the method with some reluctance, my mind is racing.

_Ask him if muggles ever go in there._

"That may not work, Potter, if a bunch of muggles are going to be exposed as well."

He looks disappointed. "Ah, yes I hadn't thought of that."

_Granulous Nettle!_

_"What?"_

_It causes an awful rash to anyone who touches it or even inhales a good amount—any magically inclined person, that is. Ordinary muggles have no such reaction._

_"How do you know?" _

_Because my father would come home covered in it and couldn't understand why I would sneeze and scratch. It's not native to Britain, so it only grows in a handful of wizard greenhouses like the one my father worked in._

James appears to be trying very hard to push away a thought—no doubt the idea that Lilly and I must be communicating silently. He's really worried about her, this much I can see. I wish I'd gotten to know this intelligent, caring James before I lost the right to know him.

While I'm trying to look anywhere but James' suddenly very grown up face, Lilly is relaying my idea.

He's begrudgingly impressed. "So am I to track the rash? Seems a bit overt."

_I'm going to include an antidote with the allergen. People will 'test positive', as it were, for exposure to the nettle, but they will feel no ill effect._

James actually grants a half-nod in my direction when Lilly shares this little innovation.

"How much time do you need? I can't really start my end until I have the substance to work from."

"Except you wouldn't be working from the raw substance, would you?"

_Yes, he'd have to use you as a test case._

"That's right," James says, far too pleased at the prospect of spending time with Lilly. "Gryffindoor Tower has a secret room I use sometimes to try out my charms. Do you know—"

I listen to them sharing house lore, miserably kicking myself for not realizing they were in the same house. They must see each other all the time. Perhaps they study before the same fireplace in the common room.

_There are some substances I need to begin the work,_ I think to her quickly and am gone before she can wonder at my haste.


	15. Chapter 15

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 15: The Ouroboros

Soothing black air envelopes me within moments of leaving the castle. My feet take a different turn than usual—I don't want my friend following me right now. And there's one snag to our plan—I'm not sure where to find Granulous Nettle, which is the raw ingredient in Dulcet Banish, a difficult-to-prepare potion that can flush out a great many poisons—if the potion master can stand being around the main ingredient that is. I've never used it or made it. Granulous Nettle is just one of the first things that showed me that my father's body was made differently than mine, in addition to the elusive inner quality that produced magic.

I walk and I walk. My feet take me by a stream and I start at Aunt Adele's reflection before drinking with my cupped hands and continuing on. I am absolutely positive I walk for two days, at least. That's what my belly says, kept calm by the berries I know, and some that I merely sense, to be good for soothing hunger pangs.

There is going to be a war.

This is the thought that scours away all others. It has never seemed more imminent. It feels like the enemy could be hiding anywhere, that people are watching me from under the earth. So far, my magical ability has only been used for potions, but suddenly it feels as though the firmament is the lid of a crucible and we are all stewing away here in the variegated muck that is the earth. A few bright spots—Lilly!—and then the rest is boiling and becoming more like each other, bad gilding itself as good, good taking on the stripes and spots of bad, until only a very rare soul can tell the difference.

Unfortunately, I am one of those rare souls, I realize with a new dread. My magical sense can penetrate behind Polyjuice into the heart of someone's magic. It's a rare spell or potion that can actually change that. If I'd had any sense at locating my own magical signature, perhaps I am the very person who could discover such technology, but I suspect there are few methods that could fool me.

As my steps become more automatic, stronger, the world rises up in a new sharpness. Away from the school's distracting routines, I feel it—

A certain sense that makes my heart clench registers as "evil."

The opposite is the bright challenge that flashes through me next. This is what I must protect with my very life. That rare bit of good that still exists in the Wizarding Society that would rather I had never been born.

Just as happened with Lilly the night her suppressed weapons skills reasserted themselves with a vengeance, my part in the battle ahead becomes clear.

Yes, my potions ability is invaluable. But I am to be the canary in the coal mine, sensing whether someone is for the cause of right or against it. The times that are coming will see friendship distorted from what we have come to know it as. The enemy will be more crafty and liquid than we can possibly dream of. Our foe will take the form of our friends and use illusion to kill truth.

It is to be a dreadful responsibility. Lilly may be the one wielding the sword, but I will be telling her who to behead.

My mind runs on with its own action just like my feet. This part of the forest I'm wandering in is not truly a forest—it's a barren hill that goes on forever, rising and rising but never going down. I'm not sure if I'm in Scotland or what. It is curiously devoid of wildlife, something I can sense without moving my eyes from the regular appearance-disappearance of my feet in my field of vision.

_This is the absence of life_, I rehearse to myself.

The hair stands up on the back of my neck and I meet the eyes of a white stag, huge as the moon on the crest of the hill. _This is life._ I can feel our hearts beating, his organ much larger, much hotter and kinder than my own, and then he runs off.

A few hours later the darkness is beginning to thin and it feels strange after days in the dark. I stumble upon some berries and hold my hands over them to sense whether they are good to eat.

_This is edible._

The small orbs taste like incongruously like melons, and I eat several handfuls, less careful than I have been since my journey has forced me to forage with unknown foodstuffs.

Refreshed, I follow whatever it is that I've been following for this night that seems to have lasted for days, and is just about to be over.

When I see another stream I realize I am thirsty. Before I can bend down to drink, I freeze.

_This water is not potable._

It's bubbling cheerfully like any innocent brook, but when I drop a leaf in it, it dissolves immediately.

Curious, I follow the stream for a ways until I see a large stone with a tree growing out of it, dividing the current in two. On the far side of the brook I can clearly see a few small fish. Oddly, the water seems to be moving both upstream and downstream simultaneously, as if this little river were a mirror image of itself, moving from fresh to foul, and vice versa.

When the two kinds of water rejoin after the stone, there are fish in the stream again here too.

The light over my head has changed to day before I figure out the message:

Anything divided from itself has the potential to change for good or for ill.

And if you can find the right valve to mediate the substance's meeting with its lost half, the result can be very satisfactory.

Simply splashing the two kinds of water together in my hands causes a nasty burn. Farther on the stream is narrow enough to leap over and so I move back up to the stone. From the freshwater side I wade cautiously to the rock and gather some of the fallen leaves, which are an interesting star shape. The tree trembles very slightly but then I am distracted by my hand.

My burn disappears.

There are so many strange things that have happened on this journey, I don't stop to try and understand what power healed me. I am suddenly anxious to get back. Imagining that my face must look more confident, more myself, the way Lilly's did after her ordeal, my feet start heading back to school.

With a silly smile on my face, I feel I have for once done what my fate has asked of me. Something like truth has entered my thick head. I know why I am the monstrosity that I am. There is a battle to be fought and my unique abilities are assembling themselves to be ready for my role.

It's a clean kind of a feeling, being at peace with my fate. As long as I die next to Lilly it will be all right.

The way is much shorter this time—I'm at the outskirts of the familiar part of the Forbidden Forest in no time.

That's where I see it.

There are two bushes of Granulous Nettle, the distinctive crystalline pollen clinging to the stalks. The stuff doesn't find the British countryside inhospitable, but I've always thought it must lack some type of vector for transmitting the pollen that it has more readily in other countries. Then again, many strange and unusual plants can be found on Hogwarts grounds, so perhaps someone planted some nettle years ago and it's managed to hold its own.

I walk a few steps forward and sneeze. This is no good, is my thought while backing away. Without thinking, my feet approach from the other side, and I don't sneeze. Tearing off a wide strip of my shirt I carefully scrape and collect some of the dust using a twig from a nearby tree. From up close it is clear that this is really the same bush growing in two different stalks. Covering my nose, I peer at the fork in the woody stem, which is trembling slightly.

A tiny odd animal with two heads glares at me with four eyes. Both mouths are closed on a tail, one belonging to what is clearly a snake, while the other is attached to a kind of winged lizard. Together they form a ring that is so silvery as to seem almost liquid.

"Pardon me, I do not wish to disturb you, sir, sirs," I gasp, eyes watering, "but what sort of creature are you?"

It's inspecting me curiously, which I take to be a sign it can understand speech.

"Can you tell me the secret of your power to divide?"

The two mouths open, releasing the tails, and the whole tree becomes a more powerful irritant, filling the air with the allergen that makes my nose and throat feel like they're closing up.

Half-blind, I'm startled by the feeling of something jumping on my shoulder. Two things. The things squirm and settle themselves, and the itchy cloud is no longer so painful. Then it ceases to bother me entirely.

The thing is a placid reptilian ring again, and it shows no plans to move from its silvery grasp on a lock of my hair, so I keep walking.

Only when I'm at the front gates do I realize how much trouble I must be in. Lilly is goino kill me; it's just a question of which weapon from her arsenal she uses. And Dumbledore, he's sure to find a way to make school more intolerable.

With all the dirt and dried leaves washed out of my hair, I fall into an exhausted sleep with the tiny scaled ring on one braid.

When the dreams of burning battlefields come, I can see myself clearly for the first time, leading the charge by Lilly's side.

In the morning I wake with a new sense of calm. The annoyances of breakfast seem smaller than usual. Lilly doesn't open her mind to me; she's listening politely to a housemate's complaint about something trivial. Though she has new talents, they haven't eclipsed her old talent at listening. Dumbledore doesn't look at me—well he never does, but on this morning I would expect it.

When I get to my first class we pick up the lesson where I left off before my disappearance. With a dawning sense of wonder I begin to realize that only one night has passed, not several, as it seemed to me.

I let Lilly see a stream of potions calculations in my mind so that she will leave me to my thoughts.

She finds me later down in my laboratory. I can hear her sneezing down the hall.

"Wait a moment," I call, putting a lid on the sixth variation on the compound made with the nettle crystals.

She comes in wiping her eyes. "How can you stand to work down here?" she asks, seeing the evidence of hours of work scattered on the tables.

I pick something off my shoulder and Lilly shrieks when the two reptiles jump on to her neck and become one again.

"Knives, guns, probably explosives bother her not at all, but a tiny, rather pretty silvery creature makes her behave like a little girl," I observe fondly.

"You know I don't like pets," she says stiffly.

"Oh, I should have thought. This is not exactly a pet. This is a Mercurial Ouroboros. That's what I think he is, anyway, and I'm not sure if he's all he, or half-she, or two hes, or what. We met in the forest."

Lilly has a hard time saying the word "ouroboros," so she baptizes the two-headed serpent Boris.

We share some tea made in a cauldron I have to promise her every time is reserved for that purpose. I tell her the tale of my forest adventure and then show her the magical bestiary I checked out of the library along with a few other resources recommended by Miss Bundle. "Boris here has magical quality that is very rare and very powerful. He neutralizes the nettle well enough for me to work with it, but I think he can do much more besides." And translating from the Latin Theatrum Chemicum I read aloud:

_I am the old dragon found everywhere on the globe of the earth,_  
><em>Father and mother, young and old, very strong and very weak,<em>  
><em>Death and resurrection, visible and invisible, hard and soft;<em>  
><em>I descend into the Earth and ascend into the Heavens,<em>  
><em>I am the highest and the lowest, the lightest and the heaviest.<em>  
><em>I am dark and light.<em>  
><em>Often the order of nature is reversed in me.<em>  
><em>I am known yet do not exist at all."<em>

The little creature puffs himself up a little and Lilly giggles. "Opus contra naturam," she reads from one of the texts. "You mean he can not only make the nettle 'work against nature' and stop being an irritant, but he can do other things?"

"They're ungodly rare, or at least they choose to show themselves only on rare occasions," I say, stroking both scaly backs, which ripple contentedly under my touch. When it's in my hair or Lilly's it looks like a silver ribbon. "We can only try to watch and learn."

Boris jumps up at Lilly and she accepts his landing on her shoulder, laughing. "At the very least he's getting me used to the idea of having an animal around."

"I think I'm close to finding a substance that will bind the nettle without causing a reaction," I resume. Lilly looks skeptical. "What you inhaled was airborne from actually making the potion. That cooled liquid, over there, isn't causing you any harm is it?"

Lilly contemplates a thin yellow liquid resting in a glass decanter. "Does that mean I've been exposed and you can experiment with the antidote?"

Fearless, this girl. "Yes, I've already tried a few things on myself, but—"

"—But Severus isn't like anybody else," Lilly says in a teasing sing-song.

We laugh.

Boris makes a little sound—two reedy notes from its twin mouths—on Lilly's shoulder. She jumps. We'd both forgotten he was there.

"It appears he has a sense of humor," I say. "Do you trust me enough to put a little of this paste on your arm and then I'll try these remedies for the resulting rash? It will be a very mild rash, I promise," I say, spatula in hand. Lucky she didn't see my reaction to the first salve. The boils were worse to look at than they felt, but I managed to neutralize them quickly.

Lilly gives me the taunting smile she uses when I'm throwing knives at her, and I have to avert my eyes to the stripe of stinging blue goo I'm painting down her arm with a stick.

The way she twists her mouth to dismiss the little welts forming on her skin makes me feel weak, but I put dots of four different salves on her to see which eliminates the swelling. For me it was the green, but the orange compound is the one that works for her.

"Thank you, I couldn't have done that without you," I say distantly, clearing up some of my mess. "Butter of Acanthrite it is."

"You can experiment on me any time, Severus," Lilly says lightly.

She doesn't see the copper spoon melt a little in my palm.

When I look up with a neutral smile, about to offer her more tea, Lilly is looking at me strangely.

She leaves with Boris without saying good night.

The next day I am very close to having the neutralized nettle solution in a strength that will cause a long-lasting reaction without any discernible symptoms. It's still difficult to get it to stick to the metal on the bathroom fixtures, however, and eventually I take a break, sensing that Lilly needs to talk. We're very attuned to each other when in the same room, but it seems that the filament of our connection is stretching farther and farther these days.

My friend is out on the astronomy tower and there is a new note to her emotions.

Boris, who has been nestled in her blouse, pops out of her shirt from where he's been clinging like a charm to the necklace she always wears under her shirt. He jumps over to me to cling to the braid over my left ear.

There's no time to concentrate on the vicarious contact with scales that were just adjacent to an undiscovered region of Lilly's skin, because her window is open and images are flashing in her mind.

She shows me the loneliness that comes from being well-liked but basically unknown by other students. From being the only female she's ever known to be drawn like a magnet to any implement that can kill. I get to feel her haunting concerns that she is ugly and unlovable for being not the normal sort of girl, for having been a troubled child, and I give her a short summary of my own self-consciousness so she won't feel lonely.

This is my best friend, but she's never talked of these matters with me.

_Why did you never have a boyfriend?_ I ask suddenly after a few moments of mentally comparing notes on the stars. It's a taboo subject, really. She feels a great deal of pain at this, is all I know. _You could, you know. Many boys think you're…very impressive,_ I falter, not wanting her to guess that I am so impressed.

Something in the window of her mind flutters and I see a boy's face.

_"There was a boy in my parents' neighborhood. He moved down the street from us when I was thirteen, and we spent every minute together we could during two summers. The third summer it seemed like we would finally stop being just friends and riding our bicycles and playing football with the other kids and things like that. My cousin happened to come by when he was over at our house. I had to tell him that she has a glass eye because of me._

_"He never came back."_

It is clear to me now that she tried to fill her life with anything but boys and giggling and all the things a normal girl does. She tried to be perfectly giving and have perfect grades. To wear the pleated skirts and round-collared blouses with little neckties all the girls wear, as if she weren't wearing a costume much more than the other students.

"Mon petit chou," I murmur to the side of her face, stoically staring out at the stars that are covered by clouds. I say in French what I could never say in English, that we are much more than our worst moments frozen in time, and she is much more than this to me. My tirade in a tongue she doesn't understand seems to calm her in a way that I know no comprehensible phrases could ever make her feel better. She can accept the warmth behind the words in a way that her mind would not accept the sense.

Then the moment is over, but I seem to have passed some test. After all, what drew us together from the very beginning in the student groups was the knowledge that you should never placate someone when they're feeling the truth of their pain.

But Lilly is never sad for long. She is too full of creative ideas and curiosity.

And her dreams are too vivid. She tells them to me in class, the dream-figures she killed, never sure if they were friend or foe. The magical map—and one actually does exist in the Ministry of Magic, if rumor is right—that shows the rapidly shifting contours of the loyal and disloyal areas of Britain. We don't know who the enemy is, but we can feel him—I, especially, make it my business to feel him.

The students around us throw paper dragons and prank each other, call each other names based upon the inane house rivalry, and Lilly and I can't bear to look at each other to see the reflection of our own fears: these students will shortly be living in a time of war, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Lilly has been to two keying sessions with James, and I would never stoop to accuse him of drawing out the process. His charms are so advanced, who am I to say how long they should take?

Curiously, Lilly hasn't spoken about them at all. Boris has been mostly staying with her, and I can see she likes the soothing, almost liquid skin when she has so many serious concerns on her mind. Keeping a secret like this is harder for her than me, and I can't wait until we've delivered the message to the ministry.

One day in History of Magic I'm actually concentrating on the lesson, having recently realized that a study of previous wizarding wars would be prudent. My mind is totally focused on finding parallels between our dreams and Professor Humbert's droning description of a magical battle from the eleventh century.

Boris crawls around sometimes when he's with me, but he moves so quickly no one has noticed him. Suddenly I feel him slithering down Lilly's clothes, as vividly as if it was down my own flesh.

He moves farther down—

Par l'Ancien et mystique ordre de la—

Lilly meets my eyes suddenly just as Boris—

Rose-Croix!

Extricates himself from her knickers and begins crawling down her thigh.

He does cause a little flutter of good feeling when he nestles in the curve of my neck before sleep, but he has never gone on an excursion in my underclothes!

Lilly and I are staring at each other, stunned.

Our minds close to each other simultaneously.

Boris has introduced me to the anatomical region I have been tormenting myself over for weeks, and I'm not sure if this is the sort of heart-pounding that accompanies desire, or if I'm still very unnerved by women.

While Lilly keeps working on our project with James, I start dipping into the  
>Restricted Section again. The very little that exists on same-sex attractions seems extensive compared to wizards and witches who are indifferent to gender. Is it indifference? Is it a generalized attraction to all humans? Am I physically attracted to her? There is a strange fear that I feel about exploring such a thing with Lilly, and it's impossible to tell if that's because I now know, as I didn't with James, that I could kill her by doing so, or if I'm not really interested in her physicality. Certainly with James and Sirius it was impossible to mistake—I wanted them, full stop. Clothes-ripping, tongue-plunging <em>needed<em> them.

But Lilly, I know her so well by now. We share everything. It would be hideous if I let myself get carried away by some idle curiosity about females when she obviously actually is attracted to me. Her warrior's body moves along with mine, knowing just what to do to strike at my weakest point, jealousy. The looks and thoughts she directs at me while talking to other young men have me smiting myself with my hand magic, and she must sense something.

Whether she's foolish enough to let that mean anything isn't clear.

Knowing now that Bundle would never judge me for curiosity on any subject, I commission her to find a few muggle books on these subjects, but none of them are of much help.

At some point I close a book with a snap and stop trying to find a precedent for me and Lilly. One of the worst things about being a freak is that there never seems to be a precedent to look towards for reassurance.

_"Living mercury is clearly most perfect, and proved in all its operations, since it saves from combustion and promotes fusion. It is the red tincture, the sum of perfection, and quick as lightning; nor is it severed from that with which it has mingled so long as it exists. The same is full of affinity, cleaving faithfully, and is the medium by which tinctures are united, for it mingles most intimately with them, penetrating naturally into their inmost part, for it is of the same nature. We imitate Nature exactly, who in her minera hath no other matter whereon she works except a pure mercurial form. It is the only thing that overcomes fire, and is nut overcome by it, but delights in its amicable warmth."_

_The Golden Tract Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers, by an Anonymous German Philosopher_

It's raining one spring morning, the sort of rain that means business. The other students are walking quickly as if to keep time with the rapid downpour towards what will be an indoor Magical Creatures class. I don't have a quarrel with Professor Isle—on the contrary, she's impossible not to like—but for some reason I stop by one of the large windows and look at the rain wistfully, thinking of my summers out in the open and how my feet have become tender again from lack of running barefoot.

Lilly takes in a deep breath by my side. "Mm, I can just smell everywhere this water was collected by the clouds before it became rain. I bet this is what France smells like, and Italy and Crete."

"Actually, it's most likely Brittany and the German portion of Switzerland," I reply without thinking. Seeing her stare, I mumble, "I can taste the airborne salts that are peculiar to each region, and they remind me of potions ingredients I've used from those places."

"Severus Snape, you suck all the poetry out of life and then shove it all right back in," she laughs, shaking her head.

Feeling equal parts ashamed and pleased, I keep staring at the downpour.

"Let's just chuck it all and go outside," she says with a note of excitement.

Lilly, as always, knows exactly what I'm feeling.

We're out of doors before we can think twice about it.

"Race you!" she calls, already far ahead. Lilly's the athletic one, but my legs are longer, so in no time we are neck and neck, borrowing speed from the huge drops pelting us so hard it's a pleasure-pain. By the time we get to the magical forest, a place where absolutely no sane human would be in this weather, she stops, breathless, her hair streaming down her face and her clothes plastered against her body. We threw off our robes a ways back because they were too heavy with rain. This is the most clearly I've seen her form, and with the addition of water, the element that has always had a sensual quality to me, the effect is electrifying.

Fearing that I look like a wet rodent, I smooth my hair out of my eyes.

"Let's transfigure into birds! The rain wicks off their feathers better, and I don't want to go in yet."

"I don't want to go in either," I agree, wanting to prolong the moment. "But I have no intention of ending up in the infirmary after skipping class."

She laughs, acknowledging that I don't share her skill at transfiguration. "Become something easy and small and I'll carry you in my beak. I've mostly only flown in class; it'll be great to really spread my wings." She sees my disappointed look at not being able to join her. "Where's your sense of adventure, Severus? You love the outdoors. It's better as an animal. Just your sort of thing."

"I don't know where you got the idea I liked getting plucked," I say in the dry tone she likes, referring to the painful process of getting stray feathers removed I've had to suffer so many times before after an unsuccessful transfiguration.

Except that's not what I say.

The impropriety hangs in the air between us, and suddenly the rain that is all in our clothes makes our shared wetness seem like we're touching.

At least, that's what I feel.

Lilly looks at me exhilarated like she's just inhaled the smell of rain. She turns into a bird and flies off.

Par la Rose-Croix! What an idiot. I'm staring down at my shoes feeling foolish when it strikes me I'm still wearing shoes. Once they're off and shrunken in my pocket, my feet sink into the delicious mud. Then the feathers brush my cheek from above.

"Lilly!" I call, seeing she's off again. She's a handsome owl, gray with black-tipped wings, and she swoops a few more times, This is the closest I will ever get to her, so I turn my face up and let her wing-tips graze my face each time.

She's coming in for another swoop when she suddenly drops to the ground near me in human form. She's laughing, rolling in the mud and laughing. I throw myself down and join her. All my tension is washed from me by the pelting rain, and I forget to worry about things.

"Mud suits you," she says suddenly, and pushes my hair out of my face.

My mouth opens and the lightning strikes alarmingly close.

"Hermès!" "Merlin!" We stare at each other in alarm from behind our respective oaths.

"Here, this way!" I start running to a tree with boughs weighed down by the water.

"Are you daft? Lighting strikes trees first!" she calls from where she hasn't moved.

"Not Canoptic Cedars—everyone knows that!" She winces at the allusion to yet another bit of magical lore she's not encountered in her muggle upbringing. "Everyone that's ever worked as a shepherd, that is. Would I willingly put myself in danger of being struck?"

Would I ever put you in danger? I think to myself as we race towards the tree. Its leaves grow very close together so the rain sheets off the boughs. We're standing in a room made of waterfalls with a leafy green ceiling. The lightning strikes two trees over and she jumps towards me reflexively.

I jump back.

It must be the ozone that has every hair on my body prickling.

Lilly looks at me. She wishes she could cross these few mandatory inches separating us in this private watery world where no one should be able to interfere.

I know because she shows me with her mind.

"_It's just us, Severus. Forget who you are for a moment."_

She shakes the bough over us and a fresh assault of water pours down on us. I shudder with the delight I thought everyone felt when they entered a bath or shower, but Lilly is staring at me.

_"You react so much to water. What do you feel?"_

_You know, Lilly, you know everything that I feel. The water wakes up something wild in me, and at the same time it makes me forget why being wild is bad._

_"I know how you feel-feel. Tell me how your body feels. _When I say nothing she says with her mind,_ "The water is running from my hair, down my neck, and between my breasts."_

I swallow thickly.

_Lilly, you have this trick of asking me questions no one has ever asked but that I must have wanted them to._

_"No one can hear us, Severus." _

Her face is no longer the sardonic one she affects in class. Her eyes rake down the clothes clinging to me.

_"Take off your shirt."_

"Lilly!"

She flashes the idea of her taking off her shirt if I don't obey.

_I don't know who taught me to be a gentleman, but this is a strange time for it to assert itself, _I think at her, unbuttoning my plain dark blue shirt.

She dumps some more rainwater on my bare chest and it might as well have been her hand running down me.

_"Are you?" _Her eyes flick down.

_What do you think? _I say to bide my time, because my mind is struggling to take stock of myself.

The air between us is so hot it's drying the fronts of our clothes, and much of the heat is boiling up from my groin. How is this possible?

_"Tell me what you would do if you could."_

As if in a trance, my hands conjure some magic and they trace the corresponding places with the heat while I tell her things I didn't know I thought.

_And you?_ I manage to articulate, my heart thumping.

The image she shows me in her mind makes my heart stop beating.

But it's the feeling—her experience of it mixed with what she predicts (with astonishing accuracy) I would feel—

It's stronger than any positive emotion I have experienced, certainly, and stronger than some of the negative ones. It's less of a feeling than a revolution. It opens my eyes to something—

When I next open my eyes she's bending over me, concerned.

"Severus! You scared me! Did you faint?" She beats me with a stick. "Am I that strange for you?" she adds, sadly.

Carefully, I place a memory in her mind. That of me watching her while pretending not to watch her in the library recently. I let her see all the new things I'm finding in her, the delicious curiosity. _Yes_, I tell her, and with the word I might as well be agreeing to do what she just showed me in her fantasy. "Yes, you are very strange."

She helps me button my shirt but it feels like something is opening between us.

The rain begins to lighten. We walk back to where we dropped our robes and wring them out. I make a motion to carry hers and she snorts, walking towards the castle.

I stand there for a moment, understanding that I've come up on a boundary. It's up to me to figure out how to relate to this Lilly creature now that we've crossed this threshold, and I can't hide behind courtly manners, is the gist of it.

Anything my grandmother taught me—in between smites to my hand—about being a genteel wizard relating to fine witches is not going to serve me here.

We approach the door and I wonder what time it is. It turns out we missed our second class as well. Lilly is able to transfigure herself well enough to hide the wetness and duck into her next class, but my next session is Potions and I feel absolutely no need to rush in there.

Taking a warm shower will be a good chance to think, I tell myself, but with all the other students in class it is a rare chance to experience private pleasures.

Hermès! Where did she get an idea like the one she showed me today?

I care for her too much to ever call her something like an Incongruent, but that was—

—Just right.

My mind's eye doesn't know what to focus on with Lilly, but the sensation of her, still fresh, wrings a climax from me in a moment.

When I go to wash my hair, Boris crawls out from where he must have been clinging all through the rainy experience.


	16. Chapter 16

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 16: The Dagger

_"James has done it," _Lilly thinks at me from the other end of the dining table. "_He left me a Fragmented note in Charms class."_

Feeling an irrational jealousy that James has made something that is keyed to Lilly's touch, I shoot back

_How can we test to be sure?_

The image she flashes into her mind makes tea come out my nose. Even my fellow Slytherins are looking at me strangely.

If Lilly hadn't thought to fetch me I wouldn't have seen it happen.

_"Severus! Didn't you get the message?" _Lilly is herding me with her robe out of the library, which I hadn't noticed until that moment is empty except for Miss Bundle.

_Which?_

_"The one that says to be out at the quiddich patch at 2 pm sharp!" _

Grumbling about being interrupted, I follow her lead and rush to where I suddenly realize that all the students are indeed out on the quidditch field—

—and not a single adult is there.

Sirius and James are trying awfully hard not to look at each other, and I realize that this is the test case.

A rocket goes off. Then another. The magical fireworks spell out "Happy Birthday, Headmaster!" and keep making cheery little explosions until the Headmaster himself shows up.

"I've not remembered my own birthday in over half a century," the old man says chuckling. "But if I can be an excuse to get out of class, then I suppose I should play my part gracefully." He begins taking chocolates out of his pockets and somehow there are enough for everyone.

"Your instructors, however, may not appreciate being left out of the joke," Dumbledore says, and we see a small knot of teachers walking with an annoyed gait up to the field.

Everyone begins moving back to the castle.

_Where did he put the sample?_

_"On the students' chairs in the dining room. When would a professor touch one? Almost never. He set the spell itself to insert a disappearing message in any book opened today by someone with the nettle reaction."_

_Except—_

"Severus because he's very special," she says out loud in a half-mocking tone.

-

We both have punishing dreams about battle that night. After nights like this, Lilly likes to train alone. It gives her a feeling of being empowered for whatever comes next.

In my laboratory I tinker with the delivery system for the nettle solution for something to do, but Boris is unusually excited.

"Don't be so bloody chipper," I say to him. He's been acting strangely since our trip out in the rain, during which he somehow managed to keep from being washed off of me. "We're just going to have another round of 'no-I-want-to-risk-being-seen-at-the-ministry-portal,' 'no-I-want-to.'"

The night before Lilly and I had a row and the nightmares that came afterward make the situation worse. If we don't do something soon I'll never forgive myself, especially if it ends up making Lilly regret having held on to our premonitions for this long partially out of concern for me.

When Lilly and I are in a quarrel my potion ingredients don't seem to be on my side. In disgust I ward up the door and return to my room.

Anderson is in my bed.

He's Stunned, slammed against the wall and Petrified by my magic before he can draw out his wand.

"How did you get in here you knave?" I shout, scanning the room for anything out of place.

Before I see the mocking eyes telling me he can't speak until I loose the spell, I sense it.

Lapis lazuli. With green sparks.

"You little bitch."

"Severus!" Lilly's peals of delighted laughter emerge after I lift the spell, which seem odd coming from Daryl Anderson's mouth.

I only know him vaguely from class as a solid, cheerful boy, prone to passionate dreams, according to that one time I went to the Gryffindor Tower with James so long ago. His longish sandy-blonde hair and limpid blue eyes set in a childish oval face couldn't be more different than Lilly's magic, which is crackling under the skin.

"I got a bit of his hair when we were in Defense Against the Dark Arts class," she smiles at my calculating glance with the boy's lips. "His hair shows up so well against his dark robe, I just saw a few and plucked them off his back. He sits right in front of me."

"Whether you make it a habit of going to the boys' wing of Gryffindor tower and making love with each of the lads in turn in order to steal their hairs matters to me not at all. What I AM concerned about is WHERE YOU GOT THE BLEEDING POLYJUICE."

Lilly is never frightened of me, but I see her creeping a few steps back in the big body she's wearing. "Well, I got it from your laboratory, of course." She smiles her most dazzling smile. "I've done it several times and no harm has—"

"Several times." My voice is very soft, silken. "And how did you know it was Polyjuice?"

"It's green and it smells bad?"

"Have you learned nothing from me? Have you not listened to one single word I've said to you?" My soft voice is resounding in the room. "Do you not remember one of the hundreds of times I've told you that only at the Reveal can you tell what potion you have in hand? And then it takes skill and experience to create and read the Reveal properly. There's another compound on my shelf that smells exactly like Polyjuice—it has very similar ingredients. If it gets excessively wet or cold—as basement laboratories are wont to do—this potion will take on a green color almost indistinguishable to Polyjuice. Do you know what the name of this compound is?"

"No," she says in a voice so much smaller than Anderson's body.

"Blushing Bane, so called for its usual red color. It can kill you dead on the spot with just a taste." I look at her in wonder and she flinches from my gaze. "And don't try to tell me you sensed the Spagyrics, because you can't so much as tell a Hot from a Cold or a Blue from a Red unless the wind is blowing south by southwest!"

She sobs and puts the big hands that seem so ugly compared with her magic over her eyes.

'"I wanted, I wanted…"

"What could you have possibly wanted that badly that you wouldn't just ask for it?" I collapse into my chair, suddenly fearing the answer.

"I wanted to go shooting," she says in a wretched voice.

"Shooting."

"Shooting." She seems to have found her voice. "I like going to the shooting range in London but I've always been afraid of Dumbledore finding out. He's never said anything to me about my childhood, but I know I'm on his list. He looks at me like—you of all people know—"

"Yes, I know."

"And besides, I've only ever seen one or two women at the range, none of them close to my age. They sort of look the other way about the age requirement because they see a boy who knows how to handle a gun, but a girl of 16? They'd laugh me out the door."

I smile despite myself. They would be very wrong in judging her to be an ordinary girl. "So you've stolen other boys' hair? Who?"

And she lists almost a dozen names, telling me a couple physiological peculiarities about the bodies she's borrowed that I would rather not know she knows.

"I thought you were coming back from visiting your aunt and uncle a little too exhilarated," I say, thinking back to the day trips to London that seemed so innocent. "Why couldn't you tell me, Lila?" I use the pet name she's never explicitly sanctioned. Lilly doesn't believe in nicknames.

"I don't know. It started long before I told you about my childhood. Before I started training with knives. My father used to sneak me off to the shooting range with him when I was younger. It was our secret from my mother—he got to pretend he had a son for an hour, and I got to indulge in my violent tendencies." She shrugs. "It seemed like a harmless way to forget about magic for a little while and do something very basic."

"Because stealing your classmates' bodies and your friend's potions is so basic." She accepts my anger humbly. "And then you were afraid to tell me once you started doing it."

The girl hangs Anderson's head. "I never wanted you to think I got close to you to get at your potions cabinet."

"Hermès Trismégiste." I go to the drawer in my desk where there is a small bottle of spirit, useful in counteracting several common compounds that can be absorbed through the skin without realizing it. Two teacups with a just a splash and then a dribble of water make our little party complete. Suddenly weary, I sit on the floor.

"Salut," I say as we clink our cups together.

"Cheers."

My head leans against my bed and I look up at her upside-down. "Always be honest with me, Lila, especially when you intend to poison yourself."

"Agreed. And will you do the same?"

"Of course."

"Do you think Anderson is attractive?"

I splutter and she laughs, a warm sound tinged by the drink.

"Not remotely, I'm afraid, though you needn't tell him that." Not that he would want the alternative.

"So you see that I really am the best one for the job," she says, suddenly reverting to our argument from the night before. "Just let me Polyjuice myself as some nondescript young man, I use the loo, and it's done."

The idea of Lilly in a male lavatory suddenly hits home in an uncomfortable way and I shoo her out of my room.

We haven't really spoken about what took place in the rain that day. It was a relief to let my feelings for her out, but I have no strong desire to move any farther into this unknown realm. Yet Lilly has a way of ferreting out what I want to hide, and it's oddly extra difficult to hide when she's all done up as a boy.

-

That Saturday is to look like any other. I have to spend the day in my room to make it look like Lilly is probably with me, and that's where I need to be anyway to fulfill my role in our little reverse-espionage caper.

Lilly is Polyjuiced at that moment as some random boy. We agreed that neither I nor James should know exactly which boy's form she's borrowed, so we can honestly claim no link to someone smearing the cubicle door-handles and toilet levers with a clear goo that vanishes on contact.

My job is to write the "news" stories the unwitting ministry employees are to have filtered into their subconscious.

_CLOAKED FIGURES SIGHTED AGAIN NEAR THE RIVER THAMES_  
><em>Officials urged to take precautions against potential compromise to water supply.<em>

_REAPPEARING HOLE REAPPEARS NEAR KENSINGTON_  
><em>Another of the elusive disappearing-reappearing holes in the earth is sighted near wizarding settlement. No houses swallowed this time. One Mellifluous Medlar tree lost. <em>

_FOURTH HUSBAND-WIFE MURDER THIS MONTH_  
><em>Wizard authorities stymied by recent uptick in spouses killing one another. In this most recent incident neighbors heard them yelling, "Who are you? Where's Henry? You're not Serena!"<em>

_HALF-BLOODS FARE WORST IN FIRESTORM_  
><em>In a curious twist of fate, the only victims claimed by the third charted firestorm in Wizarding Britain are those of half-muggle parentage. The earlier two cases are being re-opened for possible connections. The ministry rejects all allegations that Pure Bloods are engaging in ethnic cleansing.<em>

Boris is having a grand time while I write a line and scratch it out again, over the space of hours. My friend and I have dreamt these things so often it doesn't feel like I'm making them up, so it's frustrating to have them filtered through my poor writing skills and the pretense of being a _Prophet_ hack.

Meanwhile, the little silvery creature is trying to fling its ring-like form onto my quill, chasing its advance across the parchment. He's never been so animated, in fact, and I can't help but speak harshly to him.

"It's all very well for you, Boris. What do you care if she gets caught and interrogated? The Polyjuice only lasts so long and Veritaserum will get the truth out of her in a trice."

I've never had anyone to worry about like this and my emotions are surging out of my control. The tiny being jumps up on my shoulder and burrows into the crook of my neck.

"You little bastard, stop interrupting my sulk."

The door opens and Lilly slips in. She has taken the antidote in her room and she is back to her normal form, thank goodness.

When did I start feeling so comfortable with her body, anyway?

"And?" I say because she's just grinning at me.

"It went perfectly. How did your end go?" She stands over me and chuckles. "This is much, much too objective-sounding. Do you think you're writing for the _Times_ instead of the _Daily Prophet?_ We have to make it more sensational or no one will believe it."

I push the scroll away in disgust and rub my forehead. "It's much harder to make the truth sound like fiction than you would think."

"I've brought you a present," she says suddenly with an evil smile and produces a small, volume bound in worn leather.

"Ancient Animal Husbandry, you shouldn't have," I drawl in that superior tone she loves.

"You have to close your eyes," she croons, and a blinding spell is on me before I can block it. Damn this girl for getting through my shield on a daily basis. "Are you comfortable?"

And then she spends the next few minutes filling me with the comfort/discomfort of her voice describing the most wicked perversions and how it makes her feel to think them.

How does she know exactly what I like?

Then the blindfold is ripped off and I am treated to the sight of three shadowy forms (how did she know I would like three? I've never told her about Sirius or any of the other boys because it seemed the only courtesy I could do them) doing exactly what she has been describing.

She laughs her crystalline laugh at my speechlessness and shows me the book, "Casting the Imago," which she must have gotten in one of the antique bookshops on Diagon Alley. Before I can read more than the first page dealing with making the imagination come to life, she is speaking again. This time about pleasures she has imagined in the months of masturbatory explorations she does nothing to hide from me now.

There is a new presence in the room. It is Lilly's sexual attraction. That girls might suffer from lack of contact as boys do simply never occurred to me.

_"Do as I do."_

Her hand slips under her robe.

My hand does the same, only because I need comfort from the soupy mess of fear and desire that my body has turned into.

With one notable exception.

"_Tell me." _Her eyes pursue me and I am sure they will hound me to my grave. I want to tell her but there are no precedents for what I feel at this moment.

Lilly opens the window of her mind to me and I gasp.

That night we pool our pleasure and it increases ten-fold. Our eyes keep stealing to the glittering figures that are taking more and more definite shape the more we play with them.

Since we don't lay a hand on each other, no one can fault us.

When we do it again the next night, it's all the more exciting because we intend to do it; she comes to my room expressly to do this with me.

But more than the shapes she conjures, it's when she lets me in to that window in her mind and makes me feel what she feels—

_"I wish I could feel what it's like for you."_

_You do, that's the thing. It's really very similar._ I stimulate myself in the way that I crave and my eyes close involuntarily.

_"This is what you look like when you do that. You're so beautiful, Severus."_

I grimace.

_"Look at what I see."_

It's the first reflection of myself I've seen for ages.

Accepting that this is a subjective rendering of me, I'm either oddly attractive or she loves me that much to think so. Not the worst choice I've ever faced.

_And this is what I see._

I run through every part of her I've seen. _Touch where I tell you,_ I say, the first truly daring thing I've suggested.

"Touch where I tell you," becomes one of our favorite games.

With time, this female body, never seen in its entirety, becomes so familiar underneath her clothes, its shared sensations so much my own, that it becomes my reflection.

Even though my physical sensations and my thoughts are not completely open to her, she often knows my emotions before I do. We meet the world all over again through the other's perspective. Through Lilly I do get to experience the joy of flight as she goes out on the brief periods she can manage as an animal. She gets to know better what I can sense in magical substances, the joy I get from potion-making, and the special affinity I have for water. Lilly spends long hours trying to sense the magical test kit I give her, and she has a little success.

The knock comes at my door, and my groin begins to grow hot thinking of what games she has planned.

It's all I can do not to tear off our clothes. We have such a bond woven between us that there is no need to pass thoughts back and forth. I share my most frank cries with her and I could have been struck dead by the desire in her eyes as she devotes the other half of her attention to herself.

She strokes my hair, pushing it out of my face, and I mirror the sanctioned gesture.

I never get in as deep with anyone as I do with Lilly. There's simply no end to her. Wherever I am, her intuition has her as close as my skin, closer, in a moment.

We're having regular orgasms in my room and I nearly go mad expecting Dumbledore to intervene, but he does not.

-

For some reason, it angers me a great deal that Dumbledore doesn't care enough about Lilly to haul me into his office and demand what we get up to nights in my room. Doesn't he care about her at all? I rage at him silently from the Great Hall table at mealtimes. I want him to accuse me of putting her at risk so I can shout back at him that we've found a way to get around all of his stupid, cruel requirements and be happy together all the same. The words are hot in my mouth whenever I see him:

"How could you know what's best for either one of us! You with your cold, spidery games and your sweeties, what do you know of two people finding each other and saving themselves from some worse fate than love? Monster or no monster!"

But the Headmaster seems mainly focused on the close of the quidditch season.

Lilly is also furious, but for a different reason.

"_There's nothing in the _Prophet _again today," _she says at dinner.

_The ministry may not be above manipulating the news for its own purposes, but it's not very well going to publish an article about hunting down possible insurgents._

My mind pushes a warm, affectionate feeling at her across the table but she just scowls and keeps playing with salt spilled from the saltcellar. We've been over this a thousand times. I don't know what she expected to happen after our information campaign with James concluded satisfactorily. At least, I was satisfied when no one traced anything to us at all.

Then again, I have few illusions about wizarding society. Lilly still thinks there is something like fairness to be found in it.

_Mon petit chou, picture my Aunt Adele, or my grandmother._ She's seen my reflection once in one of my more reflective potion surfaces, and she giggles. _They are not necessarily bad people, but they are the last ones to expect any sympathy or candor from. It's all intrigues stretching back hundreds of years and taboos they can't remember the reason for. And above all, they care very much What the Other Wizards and Witches Think. _

_Imagine an organization—whose employees may not all be like them—but whose leaders certainly were chosen for just these qualities. Would you expect them to admit that they had missed a threat of this nature if they were to confirm our suspicions? These people will be positive that they themselves discovered that war is brewing. They're probably toasting their cleverness as we speak._

I manage to get a little smile out of her.

"_I thought my conscience would be clear once we did what we could to warn them. But the dreams—"_

The smell of smoke is often in our throats, sometimes in the middle of class.

-

_He who works without salt draws a bow without a string._

_-The Book of Soliloquies,  
>As quoted in The Golden Tract Concerning The Stone Of The Philosophers, by an Anonymous German Philosopher, in the collection by Arthur Edward Waite<em>

Bearing the burden of these dreams, and our secrecy about them, is too much for a couple of students, no matter how precocious we think we are.

For this period of my life, I finally become a stupid teenager.

We're too old for classes. We're too jaded by all the class rituals and house rivalry and Special Pudding on Saturdays. Our old group is securely in others' hands and our premonitions are in the hands of the ministry, so there is nothing to do but get through the end of school.

We start hanging around with other students who sneak out to Hogsmeade and drink Firewhiskey and do stupid things with their budding magic. I can't get drunk but it is intoxicating to be hard and uncaring and let everyone know how little I think about the world and the unfortunate place they have reserved for me in it.

That I am always a little apart only serves to increase the mystique that is the only thing that seems to identify me to the other students. But Lilly, she is daring; she is outrageous. This would-be warrior has learned ways to earn extra drinks at the bar we sneak into with an aging spell she has to help me get just right. She plays drinking games with some unsavory bar denizens and can hit a target at twenty paces blindfolded with her dagger. It's something we've practiced together many times, but it never ceases to amaze the men she wagers with.

I watch this girl making sport out of the low-level vagabonds in the wizarding pubs, throwing back whiskey with a joyful motion of her long white throat, the trousers she wears when we're riding brooms at night a little too big over her narrow hips. She carries a knife in her boot and many more in the tweed waistcoat she affects (which never fails to make me think of Romania), and she can juggle them in a way that mesmerizes me because it is her magic come out to play.

The girl is fearless, I am saying to myself for the hundredth time while she wins two drinks from some traveling merchants who have already fallen in love with her, and she returns to our seat.

"Those fools weren't even looking when I was showing them that card trick. It's a waste of perfectly good Lilligemency if they don't appreciate it." We smile at the word I coined what seems like ages ago when we were first discovering each other.

Lilly now enjoys using her sensitivity as a kind of sport. She doesn't believe in healing anymore. We're too busy turning each other over and over in our shared mental space, admiring the scars that life has inflicted on us, watching the bruises bloom.

Several sets of male eyes scrutinize our interactions.

Everyone is a little in love with her. Why not me?

"Fucking go for her man," one bloke whispers frighteningly close to my ear while I think no one is watching me watch her—as light as an elf and as dark as a shade. "We've all tried, but she's not having it, mate. It'll be you or no one. What are you waiting for?" he slurs and then stumbles away.

What indeed?

Lilly catches my eye and stares me down until she forces my eyes down her slight body.

I'm powerless around her and she knows it.

But at that moment I suddenly realize something: I don't know if she grasps that my passivity with her is because of how much I like to be powerless.

My eyes following her automatically when she returns to the target board, I see something else she has hidden from me. In her mocking gestures with the ruffians at the bar. There is a part of her that is mocking herself. Only I could see this in set of her spine, the tension in her leg, and now I am a fool for not seeing it all this time I thought we were swimming in the same stream. For the first time I begin to sense the pain she has hidden from me within the very heart of our pleasure.

She still thinks of me as being attracted exclusively to males.

She feels like a fool.

My heart aches for her. Right then and there, in the noisy bar, I resolve to do something about it. But what? In addition to the concerns about my condition, I haven't the slightest experience in initiating or wooing or being the active partner at all.

I'm struggling with the urge to wait until I can go to the restricted section for another fruitless search about sexual personality—

But she's already calling me from the target board. People are soon to forget their drinks while they watch her throw knives at me.

She indicates the chair where I am to sit and clears away any patrons sitting in the area. A hush always settles over the crowd. Lilly's frustrated magic—the Bequest she can't rightly use until Fate calls for it—surges hot and red-blue out of her most secret core.

She needs these games at least as much as she needs the other ones we play alone, this doubly caged witch who is forbidden from following two of her desires.

The red-haired, blue-magicked girl holds up a blade. Some of the women cover their eyes.

The knife doesn't get close to my shield, but it's close enough that even the men gasp when it settles in the wall behind me with a ping.

"Go on! Do us another one!" The crowd urges.

Lilly throws three at once and still her magic is barely satisfied by the way they soar through the air and begin to fill in the outline of my form with her daggers.

She holds up the last one, my gift to her, the knife with the lapis hilt. The crowd has forgotten all thoughts of danger because they are being thoroughly entertained.

The steel sings near me and I lean just a fraction of an inch to let it part my shield. I can tell by the way she shudders with me that this completion of her magic feels as exquisite for her as it does for me.

It's not a deep cut, but the sight of blood on my cheek has flashbacks to putting out her cousin's eye beating against the window of her mind.

Pity. I hadn't foreseen that.

Lilly is bounding towards me just as I had foreseen, however. All healer again, she takes my face in her hands.

"Severus, what have I—"

I lean up and kiss her.

They tell us later that people hooted their approval at our kiss, but from that moment forward, the world ceased to exist for Lilly and me. Just like when her blade drew blood, as it is meant to do, something grew to completion for us when our lips met, as if a seed long kept in the dark burst into life with a ray of sun.

"_You go first to the Magical Forest, the place where we usually meet. I'll follow in a few minutes," _she instructs me with perfect calm once she's made a little playful gesture to the men who are asking her for a kiss as well.

No one ever pays much attention to me, so I can slip out and wait for her in the dark.

The Ouroboros is purring.

"I don't know just what your magic is, little beast, but I won't let you take all the credit for this," I murmur, stroking its scales. It hides somewhere in my network of braids when Lilly's broom pulls up.

We kiss for long enough to tell each other wordlessly what we would do if we weren't too smart to let ourselves get carried away.

_You won't doubt me anymore?_

_"No, Severus, I know you want me now."_

_You promise you'll find a pretext to be examined by the infirmary, just in case this minimal contact hurt you?_

_"Of course."_

She moves to get on her broom and a stab of worry comes at my heart. What if she's become enamored of my True Face, like all the boys?

_You're not seeing me as different than usual? Quick, tell me five flaws you see in me._

_"You're an incessant worrier, you can spoil any perfect moment, you are rotten at Transfiguration, you're worse at talking about your feelings, and you make me feel like you don't think I have my own judgment about my actions."_

Lilly's dazzling smile floats in midair in the darkness.

When she flies off I put my hand to my cheek, hoping I'll carry a scar from this night forever, even if I won't be able to see it.

I chalk it up to the fact that the wound occurred out of love that it's already healed.


	17. Chapter 17

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 17: The Blue Butterfly

_There are two soldiers, both of them hot-tempered—which one is responsible for the other's disposition? Neither of them. A pair of twins that look alike—which one has it from the other that he looks like him? Neither of them. Why should we then call ourselves children of Jupiter and children of the moon being all the while one with respect to the other like twins?_

_Volumen Medicinae Paramirum, Paracelsus_

The knock comes at the door.

I open my bedroom with craven lust painted on my face.

A male student stands there.

"I'm afraid you have lost your way," I say while hastily trying to compose myself. "This is a private corridor."

I can't help but notice that the young man, though slight of build, is very attractive, and it occurs to me that perhaps he is a transfer and doesn't know to stay away from me.

He gives me a look that comprehends everything I could ever desire from an attractive young man like him.

"Are you going to let me in, idiot?" a male voice with Lilly's intonation comes out of his mouth.

I fall inside the door and she shuts it after us.

It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. This is Lilly, but a male Lilly, perfectly suited to her magic and personality the way no Polyjuiced form could ever be. Her movements are perfectly natural, not like she's wearing a big suit, as she moves over to sit on the bed, her legs naturally settling into a masculine posture.

I think I will die from happiness.

"How did you?" I finally ask after ogling to my heart's content while she—he—smiles broadly. "You have a hard time even flying as a bird for longer than a few minutes, and almost nobody can transfigure into another human form."

"I didn't transfigure." This new Lilly slouches, moves her shoulders differently, but somehow it's still the same person.

She nods at my discovery. "I found my Twin."

"No!" I stop staring long enough to be thoroughly impressed. "I thought it was just a rumor."

"Is this a rumor?" she asks, unbuttoning a button or two. "Our mirror image as the opposite sex isn't a myth, it's just really, really difficult to find and even more difficult to stay in and move around in it. It's taken me three years, ever since I heard about it, to get this far."

"Three years?" But she and I have only been close this school year.

"Wanker. My whole life doesn't revolve around satisfying your sexual predilections."

Her jests seem harsher coming from this male version, and I wince.

"Before I knew you there was basically no way to get Polyjuice so I could sneak away to the shooting range." This is true—I'm probably the only student who knows where the Controlled Potions are kept, and that's only because their combined magic nearly knocked me down the first time I walked by the blank wall hiding them. "When I heard about this Magical Twin business in class I started trying to do it."

"How did you do it? People have written treatises on the topic; I've read some of them, but I've never read of anyone achieving this," my hand gestures shyly to her—him.

"Well you and I both know that all these ancient texts are worse than useless—more designed to throw you off the trail than point you to what you're looking for. If you hadn't been learning magic from nursery rhymes since you were a child, you would be as lost as the rest of us."

I'm trying so hard not to stare I don't even react to her usual gibe at my upbringing, so she continues proudly, "It was very hard. It took me a year just to determine what I _would_ look like if I could, and then of course we were growing so rapidly at that age I kept having to change my target image. Once I had that in mind, I could only keep the form for a few minutes. I thought it was hopeless, and then I met you—"

"Polyjuice purveyor to the pistol enthusiast," I supply, and this new masculine laugh makes me go weak.

"And I didn't need to rely on using my Twin, but for some reason I still kept practicing in the middle of the night. Once I started having the dreams, it seemed like it would be really useful to be able to transfigure on the battlefield if necessary."

"So it was a sense of urgency that helped you create a stable form?"

"No, I think it was Boris." She picks the little creature from the hollow in her clavicle and I swallow audibly.

"Yes, I think he's been working some sort of magic on me as well," I say neutrally.

My trousers are open before I remember our play is usually with clothes on. "Let's do this together."

"Alas, my Twin's body is not yet perfect," she steps back. "I've been wanting to share this with you but the hydraulics are surprisingly difficult to figure out."

She lets me look my fill.

"What should I call you?" I ask shyly of the person I know better than anyone.

"Lyle seems the easiest," he says. His hand stretches out in the teenage boy's version of a handshake as if he did it every day, and then he remembers he shouldn't touch me. Still the clear master of the situation, Lyle commands me, "Ask for permission to go somewhere over next weekend—wherever you think would be believable. Ireland to gather moss or whatever you do," she-he says at the door. "I'm beginning to feel the shift happening and there's nothing stranger than being caught in between forms."

I nod dumbly. "Why did you wait so long to show me?"

"Lyle wasn't interested in being with you if you didn't want to be with Lilly just as much."

"You had better not be of the mind that Lilly being with me is 'contra naturam,'" I say to Boris, but he has gone with Lyle.

-  
><em>How did your examination go in the infirmary? <em> I suddenly remember to ask Lilly at lunch.

_"Everything's fine. I told Nurse Lessmore I was worried I was training too hard and she gave a thorough check to my magic as well as my body. I was actually curious to see if spending so much of my time as my Twin was going to show up in any of the tests, but it didn't. Everything is fine."_

_That's very good to hear._

Hopefully no one notices my new habit of blushing around Lilly.

-

The next night she comes again as Lyle.

"Aren't you concerned that someone will see you?" I ask.

"I come here as a rat," the young man who is familiar and enticingly different says from his perch on my bed.

"Take off your clothes."

"What?" he starts. This is not at all how our games go.

My hand-magic starts working at his buttons. "All right, wait a moment." His clothes are off after what feels like an age. "The hydraulics are—"

"Be quiet and do as I tell you."

The blush spreads across his strong jaw and I want to kiss it.

For two teenage boys exploring together, it's a rather tame evening. I don't lay a hand on him at all.

But young Lyle staggers away with his understanding of the male anatomy somewhat more complete than when he walked in.

-

Lilly is now truly the creature of my dreams. She often shifts to Lyle when she's in my room, but regardless, there is a completeness to our relationship. We can sit around shirtless in our trousers and study or complain, or, well, sit around fully clothed and study or complain. But I dream of going out with her in the new form, the way I was never able to publicly acknowledge my attraction to men before.

Sometimes we will be in the library or even in class and I will look over and see her as a man for a moment. She says people are unlikely to notice such a flicker, but it makes me shake with happiness.

One day sitting across the table from me in the library she thinks something at me that makes me drop my book.

Then I see she has indeed made some progress in the hydraulics department.

Quite a lot of progress.

-

_The matter of the Tincture, then, is a very great pearl and a most precious treasure, and the noblest thing next to the manifestation of the Most High and the consideration of men which can exist upon earth. This is the Lili of Alchemy and of Medicine, which the philosophers have so diligently sought after, but, through the failure of entire knowledge and complete preparation, they have not progressed to the perfect end thereof._

_- The Book Concerning The Tincture Of The Philosophers: Written Against Those Sophists Born Since The Deluge,  
>Paracelsus<em>

That weekend, Lilly and I leave separately after dinner on Friday. It's not the first time I've gone away over the weekend. The wards at school tamp down upon my magic and mental clarity, so usually every few months I go somewhere to clear my head and walk around barefoot and re-attune my sensitivity to the natural world. And day trips to Diagon Alley are a matter of routine.

This time, however, I'm as nervous as a schoolgirl waiting for Lyle at the muggle coffee shop she chose for our meeting spot.

He slides in to the chair across from me and patiently waits for me to get a handle on my ridiculous joy.

"I brought you a change of clothes because I knew you wouldn't wear what I wanted you to." He slides the shrunken package across the table.

"These are clothes a muggle would wear, aren't they?" I ask, looking down at my plain shirt and trousers.

"Change in the washroom. Don't make me come in there," he says and I hurriedly retreat to see what on earth he could have brought for me.

It's actually not so bad. There's nothing exactly special or attention-getting about the clothes, but they actually fit in a way I can't usually be bothered with. There is a lack of discoloration and tiny holes at the cuffs from potions splashing on them, and overall there is a different sort of sensibility to these garments. Instead of saying, "Leave me alone with my potions," the dark red shirt and narrow black trousers and jacket seem to say something warmer.

I emerge from the lavatory and any doubts I had are dispelled by the look on Lyle's face.

There must be a law against one male looking at another like that in any society.

He pays for our coffee, which we've not really acquired the habit of drinking yet, and we walk around a little, basking in the sheer delight of being together.

"We should do an aging glamour before we go in," Lyle says, and I realize that we are in a specific part of London.

"This is where—"

"They do the things we like to do," he finishes, and then he puts the charm on himself and walks me through my own.

By the time we walk into a certain establishment, we are two lads in our early twenties who can't stop staring at each other.

Nobody minds.

We have a couple of drinks and some muggle food I don't even taste because the taste of Lyle's blue magic is sweet in my mouth.

Some of the other customers start up a conversation with us and I sit there like a mute while Lyle makes up the most extravagant stories about how we met, how long we've been together, where we study at school.

"I can tell you've been together for a while," one of the men says. "You're one of those couples that moves at the same time like you're connected by a string."

My eyes meet my companion's and Lyle's lips twist a little to make me stop being so serious.

"You see?" the man says and a few people laugh. They have enough sense to leave us alone, because if not I was flipping through my mental spellbook, looking for a way to get rid of them without throwing them across the room.

"You'd do that for me?" Lyle teases at the thought I put in his mind.

"To be alone with you? I'd do worse." The heat between us is so great that the little candle in the center of the table glows very bright for a moment. People glance in our direction and I control myself.

He regards me thoughtfully. "Then you'd dance with me."

"I, yes, what? Never." My hands are trying to retreat up the sleeves of the robe I'm not wearing.

He gets up to go into the room where there is music and his green eyes shoot me a warning that I had better follow.

"I only know how to dance the Wizard Quadrille and the Mariner's Minuet," I hiss at him. "And my grandmother said I looked like a—"

"Will you shut up?" Lyle puts his arm around me and draws me close with a rough jerk. "I didn't take you here to hear about your grandmama."

Lyle is taller than Lilly but a little shorter than me. That doesn't stop me from laying my head on his shoulder as we sway oblivious to whatever cacophony that passes for muggle music these days.

Nobody cares.

Everything that Lilly, Lyle and I have gone through together this semester has brought us to this place where we can share a simple embrace in public and no one is there to forbid us.

When Lyle draws me by the hand I follow.

He hails a taxi and our hands rest lightly on each others' knees while the muggle contraption spirits us away to a more modest section of town, where he has booked a room for the night.

There are two beds and we waste no time pushing them together so we can clasp hands across the coverlet and look into each others' eyes and occasionally kiss.

There has been a great deal of debate about this, but I honestly cannot tell you whose fault it is that we did so much more than that.

Our bond had grown so close over the space of months that I can't even tell whose hands undressed me and whose were guilty of undressing him.

All I know is his skin felt like water sliding over mine. My most favorite element and my secret pleasure, water, he, she, it, engulfed me wetly after murmuring a spell I didn't even know he knew.

His legs around my waist, my lips in his red hair, breathing his breath, feeling his sensations from only one heartbeat away—

We only stopped for a moment to rest and then he was doing everything I just did back to me and more besides.

While we held each other as tightly as we could while still looking into each others' eyes, I saw my lover's face flicker.

"Are you all right?" I ask, suddenly rigid with worry.

"Don't be daft," Lilly's voice says, "I still have trouble keeping my other form for more than a few hours."

I kiss her very deliberately and fold the smaller body in my arms. We drowse with our arms around each other. There is a future for me, I just know it.

That future ends in about 20 minutes "Do you think you could?" I venture.

"You're a beast, Severus," she says, wrapping her legs around me once again.

My hands are getting acquainted with this new body, and I rejoice at feeling no fear at all. My lips are mouthing against her shoulder, "ILILILILILILIL," and I don't know if it's "Lilly" or "I love" being repeated all down her skin.

She shudders when I kiss down her torso to her stomach. "Severus?" she says breathlessly, pulling my head up.

"Yes?" My hands are making their way down, stealing into what I had thought of until recently as enemy territory. She arches her back at my first touch.

"No, really, Severus?"

"Hmm?" I've got it now, this urge to pour all of my thoughts and feelings into her, to remake her with the shape of my love, it's taken me months to understand and I finally know what to do.

"Let's have a baby together."

"What? Oh, Lilly, I'm not sure I can." From what I've been able to tell from some primitive experiments, I'm completely sterile, but the last thing I want to do at this point is talk about my fertility issues. My need is pressing towards a very sensitive, coveted spot.

"Maybe if I practice enough," she pinches my bottom, "I can get a handle on this other body and get you pregnant."

There are several good reasons why that is not going to happen, rumors about male wizard childbearing notwithstanding, but I stupidly say, "Don't you think a child deserves a better parentage?"

The avalanche is beginning inside me and there's only one small thing stopping it.

"Because I'm a mudblood you mean," she says very, very quietly, still tracing circles on my back.

"No, Lilly, because the world isn't a nice place and I'd probably eat our children!" I say, the awful thought of the child inheriting my condition coming to me and with it the idea that it might eat her or we might eat each other.

She's already getting dressed, rolling up the cuffs of the trousers Lyle wore.

"You bastard, I trusted you, and all along you're thinking you're better than me because of your old, old, wizard blood."

This doesn't make any sense, but that's not what sends a chill down my naked spine. This person I have just shared my most intimate moments with is swearing at me with oaths I've never even heard of. I tilt her face towards me so I can see her eyes while she rants.

Lilly is completely mad.

I'd recognize that haunted look like my mother's anywhere. When I Stun her the look in her eyes doesn't change. Quickly, I pack up our things and use a power I've not even mastered yet to apparate us to St. Mungo's. It takes a few tries for me to get to the right doorway with Lilly in my arms.

"My friend is unwell," my voice says softly. They ask me questions and only when they insist do I finally let the bundle with the unfamiliar, anguished features—not Lilly, not Lyle, not anyone I have ever known—out of my arms for what I know will be the last time.

They keep me from her once Dumbledore swoops in and figures out what happened. Or at least, he has his theories, but there's no way to know what really happened.

They say they found strange drawings and scribblings among her things, showing that she had begun to go mad a long while ago and was keeping it from me, from everyone, until I touched her and made the last thread snap.

No one would show them to me, so I can never be certain, but they could very well have been notes in code from all our dreams about the impending war. I want to think she was completely sane the entire time, that she made choices with the judgment I always trusted completely.

To think that I bent her will to my depraved exercises makes me vomit on more than one occasion.

The most likely explanation is that Lilly had some trouble keeping to the chaste conditions necessary for her safety, but Lyle, as a young man who had never, himself, had any sexual release, found it impossible to play by the rules.

Nevertheless, my own mind is impeccably clear. I have no excuse.

Like when I was wandering through the countryside looking for Granulous Nettle and identifying the qualities in my environment, I conjure up all of the ecstasy and tenderness I experienced with my lover on this one night, and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.

_This is illusion. This is selfishness. This is the transmission of madness and death._

_See that you never forget._

They keep her at St. Mungo's for two weeks, but I have good reason to believe they have her seeing a counselor in Hogsmeade for long after.

Only once I realize that I haven't seen Boris since our calamity do I realize that he must have been with Lilly.

Asylums have to deal with all sorts of parasites, so they regularly douse patients with a mild Red solution to kill any foreign organisms.

The Ouroboros, that rarest of creatures who valiantly fought for our opus contra naturam, perished like a common Mantis Moth in a bath of Byrubiam Flush.

For myself, for my love, even for my Lilly, I didn't shed a tear up until that point. I didn't deserve to.

For some reason, the Ouroboros' tiny silver death sends me out into the Forest to weep.

-

All I know about these confusing, painful last few weeks of school is that my former friend spreads a rumor around that I called her a mudblood.

Needless to say, every member of MAHB-US closes ranks against me.

My solitude is once again complete.

Everywhere I go, one of them is there to play childish pranks that bounce off my shield easily. Once I get snared by a Confundus curse that bounces off my head and trips me up underfoot. But it hurts to see these people express their irrational feelings of betrayal. Thank Hermès I never told them many specifics about my past. But it's unbelievable how these students whose scars I faded and shields I helped build up resurrect the "murderer" rumor.

Dumbledore dedicates a half of a glance in my direction at dinner. Enough to say that he didn't concern himself with my excessive closeness with Lilly because I was either too homosexual or too socially disabled to actually build an intimate relationship with anyone. And that he kicks himself for having led me to swear not to be with a boy within school grounds, and not including a girl as well.

I hate him. How can I ever try to be normal when the most powerful wizard around is constantly plotting around his certainty that I am a monster and will act like one?

-

The headmaster finally gives me an audience two days later and I wonder whether I should kiss the hem of his robe.

He listens to me blame him for letting me get close to her, blame myself for nearly making her a permanent resident of St. Mungo's.

Finally he speaks.

"We can only act upon what we know. Would you rather I expelled you before? She's been undergoing weekly physicals since she started asking questions that indicated she wanted to be close to you."

"Lilly submitted to this condition?" My mind is racing. No wonder she never seemed to want to undertake certain activities with me.

"And when her—status—did not change you seemed to be having a chaste time of it."

I blanch. They've been monitoring her virginity?

Inwardly I have a black sort of smile. Lilly certainly did everything except that. She must have enjoyed fooling them.

"She seems to have gone to great lengths to meet you halfway, Severus," the headmaster says, I don't care enough to find out if he means her Twin form, her abandonment of school activities, or some of the specific things we got up to together.

She's a world-class Incongruent in her own right! I want to rage at him, but say nothing for her sake.

Or at least that's what I think at Dumbledore. Alone in my room, I don't usually get off that easy.

When Lilly is still in the hospital two days later and Dumbledore is never in his chambers to receive me, I decide to take matters into my own hands.

My invisibility potion is as strong as they come. I half-hope it's so strong that I never reappear. It would be a relief to be a ghost, I think at that time in my life.

But that night I dose myself near St. Mungo's and watched my body disappear as if it were the answer to a prayer. When I walk through the door close on the heels of a doctor I picture Lilly's blue magic shining in my tissues like the only spark of life that has ever been in me, divided from itself but still pulsing like a butterfly bisected down the middle.

"Flap-" goes the half in my heart

-flap," answers her lapis lazuli somewhere in the locked wards of the hospital.

"Flap-flap. Flap-flap" the blue butterfly goes.

Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap- Flap-flap-

I can almost hear the wings beating in the air, desperate to rejoin.

Now, Severus, focus, you don't have the luxury of going mad.

It takes all my will not to go to her. It would only send her farther over the edge. And they might find me reappearing when my potion wears off in the wee hours of the morning, waiting patiently for my own little corner of the asylum.

The records office is thankfully abandoned for the night. My hands conjure a little light and find her file.

There is a very general summary of some of the things the Mediwitch who specializes in psychological disorders—psychoneutics—has found in my dear Lilly's scrambled head. Apparently the practitioner thinks all the kinks she identifies in Lilly's mind are from me shaping her with my perversions.

But this was not a case of my perverted mind making her become my desires. I wouldn't insult such a creative and independent spirit by saying so. We came together based upon mutual desires, and if that spawned new perversities, well, then that must be the way of the world, not just the way of the Alkahest.

As confirmed by their thorough physical examination, my friend and all-too-brief lover is in amazing physical condition, which may explain why she never showed any sign of physical or magical side effects from being around me.

But then I see

_"Unmistakable signs of—  
>-burns<br>-as if from a mild corrosive  
>-would have missed them if I didn't cast the—<br>-then I saw—  
>-silvery—<br>-esophageal and—  
>burns<em>

_evident on the layers of_

_delicate tissue_

_epidermis_

_signs of cellular distress_

_more subtly but still distinct in the sample_

_deterioration_

_painless_

_dermis_

_burns_

_his tastes evident_

_Used a nonmetallic potion with a healing substrate made of borage leaf_

_Healing slowly._

Someone has left a quill in the files room. Overcoming the strangeness of writing with an invisible hand, I leave a note in her file of the next potion she is to be given, which will be much more effective than what they gave her, and wish pelicans were still in use by modern practitioners:

_A tincture of two parts wormwort combined with one part astralagus root essence._

Then my invisible feet take me out of the hospital.

In a moment the blue butterfly is torn in two for good.

Now I am completely sure that it is for the good.

Dumbledore's wards designed to keep my sexuality in some kind of check only really did one thing—keep me from ejaculating on campus. Very wise of him.

Thus began my phobia of body fluids, which may well have saved my life.


	18. Chapter 18

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 18: In Muggle Society

—A Short Excursion on Wizard Epidemiology—

The muggles have their dinosaurs, and they will debate forever about what caused that race of creatures to be snuffed out. Wizarding Society has another more pertinent obsession:

What caused wizards and witches to go from the majority to a hidden minority on earth?

It tells you something that most children's history textbooks will take one stance or another but they almost always have to do with in-fighting within the society itself.

Many years ago, they used to blame the goblins or the elves or the dwarves, all earth-dwelling magical societies in their own right that tend to keep a bit of a distance from wizard politics. Perhaps it's because they are wiser or wear their magic better than their magical-human counterparts. Maybe they see that an allegiance with any ruling authority is bound to be short-lived and thus get you on the blacklist of the next regime.

But that scapegoating never quite rang true, since that imaginary vendetta was the only full-scale conflict on record with whatever the signaled race was. There were raids and skirmishes, but nothing more. The rest of wizard history was one internal turmoil or scandal after another. Which can go on for ages without boiling over into civil war—hence the many peaceful yet conflict-ridden epochs in the wizard timeline.

But none of these things are the reason for our civilization's decline.

My grandmother told me the real reason when I was a small boy, or at least part of the reason, and the rest gradually made sense.

My grandmother said that it was intermarriage with muggles that caused our society's numbers to decrease.

But actually, I have come to believe that wizards and witches suffered a very serious plague at some points in their past. This epidemic was venereal in nature, contracted from carrier muggles and spread through physical contact from magical person to magical person.

For grand-mère, this was the foundation of her racial purity ideas she would serve my cousin and me along with her fantastic biscuits, which were by far the best food I got as a child.

For me, this idea was the outgrowth of my obsession with the harmful effects sexual contact with me produced in those I loved.

It's simply a fact that magicians and muggles have different sensitivities—hence the Granulous Nettle that stung my eyes and made me sneeze, but did nothing to my father. The reverse can be true—magical persons seem to have very strong circulatory systems and hearts. You will almost never hear of a wizard or witch having an endogenous heart condition, though they certainly can have a heart attack as part of a spell—Cruciatus, for instance.

What little information I've been able to gather about people of mixed parentage shows a mosaicism too complex for my simple data collection systems to analyze.

There was a great civil unrest during what is called the Tributlation, which is coincidentally the same time when the pure-blood mania first appears on record. There is the famous case of the muggle Desiree, a non-magical wife who was burned at the stake by her wizard husband's family because of his death from an unknown malady.

The symptoms were variously described as a tendency of all his parts to not obey him until they began wandering off separately and never came back, and a staining of the skin that accompanied paralysis of the signaled part. All the accounts were definite that the illness involved fevers and delirium.

The symptoms tended to appear in mixed marriages and the "dissolute"-which could have meant the unmarried, the homosexual, or those sympathetic to muggles.

At this time, you have to realize, there was almost no contact between the two societies. The earth was divided into territories and there was none of this parallel-and-invisible business with secret train platforms and hidden buildings. The magically inclined muggle-born usually had a hard existence-sometimes they found their way to their true society, but most often they hid their talents, were the victims of persecution, and suffered from their misdirected magic.

So intermarriage was very notable when it did happen. And just like the European settlers brought infections they didn't even know they had to the native peoples they encountered on other continents, muggles did the same to wizards—though not, it seems, vice-versa.

The general panic caused by this unknown illness lent itself to hysterical mob actions and wizards' favorite pastime: hunting down the person who supposedly cursed you so you can hex them back.

But besides having to do with a built-up immunity of some sort, the illness must have varied according to genetics as well. Since "pure bloods" are purely theoretical, a person's risk for the illness was tempered by the muggle blood they all had to varying degrees, in almost every case without realizing it. This combination of a misunderstood pattern and a seemingly random infection rate was the perfect recipe for nearly wiping out a civilization. If these panicked wizards did try to attack muggle settlements, they only came back with more infectious agents their immune systems and genetics were ill-prepared to fight off. Those that survived turned inward, inward, until you see our hidebound wizarding world of today.

Hogwarts' idea of dealing with problems is ignoring them completely until they reach emergency proportions, so there are a few venereal panics on record at the school—always ailments specific to magically inclined people. But perhaps they didn't catch the normal human problems when they occurred. Nevertheless, after Severus Snape's illustrious career at Hogwarts, all sexual policies were reviewed and comprehensive sex education was initiated for the first time, addressing both muggle and wizard diseases.

That last is true, but the rest is all theory—I never did get to write the thesis I had planned on the wizard version of "what happened to the dinosaurs?" But then, I was too busy making my own prophylactics to devote all my attention to it.

After trying many, many magical possibilities, a good old-fashioned muggle condom was the most impervious to my corrosive fluid. That I wore them religiously throughout my life even in my most sordid exchanges put me ahead of the curve in both muggle and magical society and most likely prevented any number of conditions. It was a salutary effect from my many sleepless nights spent picturing the respective epidermises of James and Sirius, during which I developed a serious aversion to all bodily fluids.

James wouldn't have given voice to this intimate injury as one of his symptoms when he listed all of his ailments that time to Lilly, but he must have had something like what she had. Probably worse.

They had so much in common that Lilly and James find each other immediately.

I want to be happy for them but I worry I've spoiled them for each other. I've warped them almost to the breaking point, turned their happy existences into depraved hells. Let them comfort each other, certainly, but let James not force her into group sex against her will, and let Lilly not weave him into her delusions.

If people catch me staring and say it is sour grapes, I don't mind letting them think it is that simple. I feel responsible for whatever goes on between the two people I almost destroyed by loving them. If they need a common enemy, I'll volunteer—

But that doesn't mean I can't mourn the loss of them.

Every once in a while I dream of the three of us—James, Lilly or Lyle, and I—having a picnic on the top of a perfect green hillside. James pours tea. Lilly wears a flower in her hair.

I learn to have my wand handy so I can smite myself for such foolishness.

At this point, let me just tell you that it has not escaped my attention that I'm dead.

And by you I mean me.

And by dead I mean either actually or almost. Close enough, at any rate.

Unless this is what it's like to be mad. Mother, is this what it was like for you? Reliving everything with all of the information you wish you had, discovering you probably would have made the same mistakes anyway?

As long as I allow myself to get caught up in it again, it's all right I suppose. The void that surges up in between images is a bit unnerving, but I have enough time to get used to it.

Ask me again after I've already relived it all a few dozen times. Then my disembodied self might be babbling in anguish, trying to drag the slightest scrap of sanity over its naked mind, for decorum's sake.

Yes grand-mère, it does all come down to a little dignity in the end. That must have been why you got swept away coming back across the channel from an engagement in France. You knew it was better than leaving remains with no one to conjure you a proper sendoff.

I don't think any of your descendants shed a tear. I didn't when I heard the news shortly after Lilly's illness. But then I had sworn off tears entirely.

No one did for me either, I'm sure of it.

If I could just remember how it happened.

It seems I've lost the thread of my own death somewhere...

Maybe it was ghastly and it's a mercy I've forgotten. As long as I'm good and dead, it's all right. Hermès, don't let my body be someone's pincushion on either the light or the dark side.

All I seem to have accomplished in life is accumulating a long list of people who could find many creative uses for my hide.

Oh, those stuffed heads they had on display around Hogwarts—it would be dreadful to have a sliver of me preserved in my desiccated head, or dear me, let me not be an animated portrait in one of the house towers! All those children gaping at me doing the same things over and over! They'll have a pet name for me! That would be hell!

Being dead doesn't make me any less horrified by gawping eyes, it seems.

My early life is so vivid to me now. I wonder how far into the future—that is, how close to the moments before my death—I can remember.

One thing I can tell you from the protection the grave offers me: I don't believe that what happened with Lilly was what was supposed to happen.

Yes, yes, I know, many possible futures, things change all the time. I know. But I truly believe that, when the bellicose dreams stopped after my breakup with Lilly, it was not because we were in a folie a deux and creating the fantasy of a war together, but because there was going to be a war until that fateful night.

Sometimes two people doing something as insignificant as hurting each other to the core can create a rift that erupts onto a larger scale.

What if Lilly was really to be the general leading the charge? What if the technology that the enemy was developing was very much like what I dreamt it to be, and they only abandoned it when a much more straightforward method of destroying society presented itself in the new version of reality that appeared when we were no longer together?

I don't for a minute think Lilly's astounding powers with weapons were meant to molder into nothing.

What I have gradually concluded over the years is that my stupid verbal misstep was enough to make Lilly feel as though the child we were meant to have—no matter who was meant to have it, I don't care at this point—was not going to happen. This shook her up enough that she reverted to her usual quarrel with me about coming from an "Old Family." It snapped the slender mental thread that was all that was left after months of emotional intimacy and hours of physical intimacy with my dissolution.

I think we were going to have a child. This conviction is stronger than any concerns about my mutated system's possible infertility. And perhaps he would have been key to society surviving the conflict after my dear Lilly and I died together in battle. Or maybe he would have grown up happy with a living hero for a mother and whatever kind of father I would have been.

I can tell you one thing. I don't believe that this boy, if it was a boy, would have been a Boy Who Lived.

The pressure that scenario put on one child was inhuman, and Lilly sacrificing herself in this one skirmish she lived to see, she deserved better than that, too.

But I hadn't really thought about all this at a time when it could have been of use to me. Because I was too busy becoming the weapon of destruction that our enemy found more economical than firestorms and more amusing than identity spells.

You know, it occurs to me that that inane prophesy about my hair didn't end up coming true. It's probably still firmly attached to my stuffed head on a pedestal in Hogwarts, most likely dressed in some undignified coif.

Now I can't stop picturing where my body is, in whole or in part. It had better be gracefully completing its cycle of decay in the ground or else my ashes mingling with the sea. I don't like the idea that it may be food while it's still twitching. Above all else, I don't want the Mantis Moths preying upon me.

Oh! Oh! Let it stop! Oh, I feel them!

There, it stopped. It was like being a child again and thinking my fingers had dropped off and turned into maggots. This won't do, Severus, you sniveling snot. You had a fantastic control over your mind as a man. As a shade, you could do yourself one better and fade away with your sanity intact. Doesn't it stand to reason your phobias would try to get the best of you now with nothing better to think about?

So what happened next?

That's more like it.

Even that crept up on me gradually within the sameness.

Everything was the same for a long time.

But first I have to lose still a bit more before I've truly lost everything.

Lessmore surprises me. For the last weeks of school she has me up there in the infirmary at her side treating patients, and she won't give anyone so much as a bandage unless they consent to allow me to cast one of the simple diagnostic spells she's teaching me. That I'm supplying half of the school's medicinals is finally given official recognition and she makes sure I get paid accordingly. At a time when even the sympathetic professors on the faculty are withdrawing their support from me, my darling Lessmore is an unstoppable force matter-of-factly smashing through these stupid rumors that I'm some kind of racial purist.

"Severus Snape has more tolerance in his little finger than all the rest of you gossip-mongerers put together," she says in a loud, clear voice before the student who refuses to let me cast the diagnostic. "I am only one-sixty-fourth Magical blood, and this boy, this young man has never offered me anything but his respect," she says, her eyes flashing in a way that makes me shake, though I'm the one she's defending.

Perhaps I was too self-absorbed when regularly in her company, but I am surprised at the nurse's statement. She has little family and didn't seem to correspond with anyone but Vin, and I still can't tell whether he belongs to the magical fraction or not.

A few of these pronouncements and the school's eugenic accusations die down. Lessmore never talks about sex with me, but she does sit unusually close to me one evening when we're playing Wizard Whist. She's offered me a bit of honeymeade, and though I assure her nothing makes me drunk, she seems to need to unburden herself.

"I'm not saying this because Lilly is a woman, but I truly hoped that you would find some way to stay with her," she says. "I never saw you interact with James, but Lilly is a brilliant girl, and she shares your interest in healing. She was your equal and was not intimidated by you.'

Here I get an intimation that the two women spoke about me as something more than nurse and patient during those weekly virginity-monitoring exams, and I pale.

"Don't tell me what happened—I know it's one of those stupid misunderstandings that unfortunately shape our lives more surely than our best intentions. Just let me think of all the times I saw you arguing about something or gathering healing balms for your group." And I realize how she must have watched us all these months. "Promise me something, Severus," she says a little unsteadily.

"Anything, darling Lessmore," I use my glass of honeymeade as an excuse to say my mental name for her out loud.

"Promise me that whoever you love, male or female, you will let that person love you, and that you will never back down because of public opinion."

I hold my wand to my heart and I swear on every evening in which she has offered me her friendship in the empty infirmary. I can feel the binding magic locking around me. Now THIS is an Unbreakable Vow, not that child's play everyone else uses.

We look at each other, and as often happens between us, I feel us conversing in the past, the present, and the future. We both know that love will bring me more bitterness than joy, and there will always be a Greek chorus of bystanders ready to believe the most exaggerated calumnies.

Madam Lessmore lives just long enough to see me make good on my promise.

Missing Lilly is a through and through kind of loss. I throw myself into my studies in preparation for my exams, utterly barren.

Unfortunately, someone else took the rumors of my views on racial purity very seriously indeed.

It could have gone on forever as it did these last weeks of my 6th year at Hogwarts. I assisted Lessmore and made potions for the school's needs. I studied for exams like any student. My hands and mind were busy and that was all the contentment I could ever hope for. I was planning my senior year course of study, which would be a combined intensive study in Potions and Wizard Medicine, since, as Lessmore argued on my behalf, many of the other senior subjects were not challenging for me. My planning was only marred by the very strong possibility that no magical school would take a risk like me for advanced studies. Concentrating my energies on things that were unlikely to hurt people was a kind of dull relief to the aching hole in my heart. There's a certain comfort to be found in knowing you have no other options.

Even though the last thing I wanted to do was to be with another human, I needed to reassure myself that I would never take magic from another magical being again. And Dumbledore's recommendations to seek out a "nice muggle chap" seemed like the only option.

So shortly after my doomed excursion to London with Lilly, a changed Severus Snape went into Muggle society.

London always seems both muted and too vivid compared to Hogwarts. There's no magic here for me to steal, yet I'm used to everyone around me keeping a forced distance. Here there is a frightening proximity between me and the passersby. I could touch them if I wanted to. Do I?

With the supply of muggle money I keep for emergencies I buy a packet of biscuits and crumble them for the birds. It's rather clinical to survey each man passing and wonder what he'd be like with no clothes. Ever the shy romantic when it comes to such matters, I find the part of my mind that has studied anatomy activated, but the misery attached to my groin remains unmoved.

Scattering the rest of the crumbs, I wonder that the pigeons haven't tried to jump on me like so many birds do. They seem indifferent. Maybe because there's no more muggle bird than a pigeon. Does that bode well or ill for my little endeavor?

The restaurant where Lilly took me was very civilized. I'm not looking for conversation with men who are allowed to love men. That's not where I'm headed. When I find the more fast-paced area, the bar I choose at random seems friendly, impersonal, and the men don't linger too long. I'm evaluated with a dozen sets of frank eyes and am not precisely met with indifference.

"We won't be that age again anytime soon, will we mate?" a friendly voice comes to my ear as my eyes rest on the early-twenties couple that reminds me of myself and Lyle on our one night..

"Not likely," I say, suddenly very nervous. My aging spell has aged me effectively, I see, but I have no idea how old I look.

The voice belongs to Albert Honeycutt, and he is, effectively, a brickmason. I'm strangely comforted by this completely normal profession. Mid-thirties, face a little lined by the sun but not unpleasantly so. His hair is cut very short and is a strawberry blond. He is the precise opposite of the mannered fairy I'd been dreading, and I tense when he opens his mouth again, fearing some awful sleazy line.

"Haven't seen you around here before—the drink is nothing special but it's cozy," he says just as naturally as you would talk to the greengrocer, looking me up and down and apparently not disgusted.

I've been going into the muggle world for short forays over the years to buy potion ingredients and supplies, and have a selection of plain jackets, rustic jumpers and a couple of pairs of sturdy slacks. Because I don't know enough to choose fashionable things, my generic clothes make me look like the foreigner that I am in their world, and that's worked well so far. Albert's eyes linger at the dark hair coiled as discreetly as possible at my nape, most of the length hiding within my shirt.

I introduce myself as "Vin Laurent," though using my old friend the shepherd's given name and mother's maiden name for this purpose gives me a twinge.

"Are you a gypsy?" he asks suddenly, and then my laugh surprises me and he laughs and he buys me a pint.

"Are you? A gypsy, I mean," he says after telling me a little about his work, his flat, a child he seems to have had along the way who he sees as often as he can. His curiosity is still trying to place me.

"I've been to Romania several times, and I can assure you a genuine gypsy would have very little patience for non-gypsies like me—or gaje, as they call them."

"Why not?"

"They think everyone who's not like them is hopelessly thick," I say, trying not to think about the divide that separates us.

He snorts with a workingman's disdain for snobbery. Don't think of my father, don't think—

"What's your situation," he says with a friendly vagueness that could include work, paramours, or possible wives, I suppose.

Because I've practiced this, there is only a tiny pause before I say, "I have no attachments at present. I travel quite a bit for my work, you see."

When he doesn't ask about my work I realize many men must want to remain anonymous. A stab of sympathy jabs at me unexpectedly. In the muggle world, men who want their own kind are more controversial than in mine, in some ways.

"I'm a researcher," I explain, motioning for another round. "It's- er- complicated," I see his face begin to shut me out for a toff, "Medicinal plants," I say. That's actually straightforward. "The complications are from the, er, university that is the home base for my research."

"Problems with grants and the like," he supplies. "My sister works at university. Sounds like a hotbed of gossip and backstabbers if you ask me."

That draws the second genuine laugh out of me.

Those two hours sitting with Albert are some of the easiest and most relaxed conversation of my life. I've even forgotten that I'm on a mission to safely relieve my sexual frustrations outside of my society. He's full of unexpected wry observations about the people around us ("City boys, those lot. Have you ever seen two necks just screaming for a necktie more than theirs?"). In the back of my mind I wonder if my curse makes normal conversation impossible with most of my magical peers, more than the wards Dumbledore had placed between us. This is somewhat easy.

"Lost you for a second there," he says, peering at me. "Gone traveling in your 'ed for a moment?"

"No, I was just thinking that I'm passing a more pleasant time here in London than I expected," I say, looking at him through my lashes with what I realize too late must look like calculated innocence for a man of my supposed age.

Albert seems to be doing sums in his head for a moment and then tosses back the rest of his drink and puts some money on the table. "You coming?" he asks without turning around.

We walk back to his flat, which is not far away, but far enough for my terror to return. He's a muggle! Will he find me odd? Will I be able to perform when my heart is still full of Lilly? He must sense my hesitation, because Albert keeps up a friendly chatter and then the key is turning in the lock.

"Make yourself at home," he says and I sink onto the couch feeling absolutely out of place in this muggle abode. It's nice—clean, he has some plants, and apparently the kitchen gets a lot of use. He's bustling in there right now and comes back with two bottles of beer and some bread and cheese.

"You're looking a bit peckish," he says and I wonder if I look insultingly uninterested. Dutifully I chew some bread and murmur thanks.

"You're not the sort to make the rounds, are you?" he observes with that disarming kindness. "I drink there because it's down the street and I know some of the people like family, but I don't play about all that much myself."

The bread sticks in my throat and I take a sip of beer to swallow. "I have not had an easy path," I surprise myself by saying. "It's not easy for me to get to know people." Oddly, I'm close to tears.

And he prattles on with that charmingly neutral voice while I answer in short sentences, so by the end of the hour he's got one arm around me and the other is playing with my hair, which he's discovered at its full length. I like how comfortable he feels. All I want is to bury my face in that man's shoulder of his and cry until there's nothing left to cry.

"You're a rare beauty, Vin. Much too good for the likes of me," and he kisses my forehead and then my cheek, my nose and finally my mouth.

It's like I've gone deaf.

My mouth has remembered the motions of kissing, it seems, but I feel absolutely nothing. Not even his lips. It's like I'm anesthetized, drowning in some cottony awareness that is yet me but has no end to it set by sensation.

It's not unlike being dead, it turns out.

While my mind is trying to understand what was going wrong, Albert is taking off my clothes. Then revealing himself with a kind of boyish cockiness he placed his cock in my hand. Is it attractive? Large? Small? Do I want to do something with it? I have no idea.

"What do you think professor?" he asks to the stranger holding his cock in his hand as if it was a strange fish he was to classify. "Will it do?"

It did. He did. I did not.

We used prophylactics but I couldn't even have one of my dry orgasms. He didn't take offense and when I left there I wept in an alley.

There was something about that unshakeable cheerfulness that shook me to the core. I will make it a point to avoid that particular bar.

Maybe the kindness was unnatural. After all, the only muggle man I knew, my father, was anything but kind.

The night was early yet so I force myself back onto the streets and find a place that targets a different class of men: the muggle equivalent what I would come to know as Death Eaters. Men who got off on the cruelty more than the sex. Maybe I'm more of an Incongruent than originally thought, I reason, trying to talk myself into it.

It turns out my wizard clothes might have been more appropriate than a thick wool jumper and tweed slacks appear to be with these fellows, but I sit in the murky establishment and endure the stares trying to cow me with their danger.

The magic I stole from Lilly during our brief encounter is still humming in my veins. I could make their heads explode with a movement of my two hands, I think while swallowing the last of my watery drink. The lights go down still further and the show begins.

Several men in the most undignified outfits I can imagine come out on stage and start mistreating each other. I feel ashamed, as if my inclinations have made me somehow party to these outfits and antics despite myself. A few of the men near me study my face for a reaction—perhaps they were expecting a bourgeois mixture of horror and excitement?

They find none. For something to do until the lights go up, my mind is calculating the volume of each man's body if it were to displace an Evermort solution at 500 fluid drams.

There is a black taste in my mouth. I should run out of this place.

A hand shoots into my lap. "Not to the foreign gentleman's taste?" he sneers, and it does remind me very unpleasantly of my father.

My body remains stubbornly inert and I am thankful for that proof that I am not doomed to chase around Muggle London looking for my own version of the Oedipus tragedy. But the hand closes too hard and it yanks at my crotch.

"Kindly unhand the relevant parts of my anatomy," I state, keeping my eyes on the ridiculous show.

"Or what?" he asks. His breath stinks of beer. I didn't see what he looked like before his face heat pressing against my ear, but he sounds ugly.

Or what indeed? Using magic against this little flea could provoke an international incident and lend much unwanted scrutiny to my well-hidden "case."

I shrug and motion for another drink of the muggle swill they call vodka to get the black taste out of my mouth. This is going to be a night to be drunk to the bitter dregs, it seems.

I won't relive the events that put me up on the stage, or try to evoke the hideous whoops with which they divested me of my carefully chosen muggle garments. I could have killed the lot of them with a spray of magic from my two hands. I could have turned every bottle of liquor to acid. But I was so fatally uninterested in them that I didn't even care to undo the clumsy leather straps they tied me with.

This is not how Incongruents feel. I know because I've read enough about them to write a treatise as long as Bigham's Book. True Incongruents have a release from doing something part of them senses is wrong. The indifference comes afterwards and it is pleasant, I tell myself as one particularly ridiculous leather-clad fellow leers at me. You call that a leer! I could make a Styxtoad blink when I was a babe! I think but don't move away.

The belt bites into my backside and that is finally something real, but all it brings me is a species of pity for these men who are even more anesthetized than me, and must resort to these pastimes in order to feel for a moment. There is no genital contact—that doesn't reach them anymore. They like all the rest.

Suddenly I jerk, not in response to the whip biting into my skin, but at the idea that Dumbledore will be very unhappy that if I don't come. The whole idea was to show that I will not ever seek release in my own world.

Enraged at my stubborn lack of an erection, they force a drug into me and eventually wrest an ejaculation. Can a climax be anticlimactic? My seed spills harmlessly on a floor that had seen worse. I stare at this bluish liquid that is the essence of my difference, that is my harmful love distilled, and it seems so banal.

The men let me slump there while they order a fresh round of drinks and go back to talking as if nothing happened. Eventually I gather my clothes and pull them on, pausing only to coil my hair as well as I can. I leave without paying for the drinks, considering their evening's fun a bargain at that price.

The damage has already half-healed by the time I get back to school.

What would happen if they did grave bodily harm to me? Would the loss of a limb or a kidney wake me up?

I return to Hogwarts and feel the building nearly wag its stone tail to see me. Yes, I missed you too, I think, patting a rough wall. The magic that had begun to envelope me some distance away has wound itself into my stomach like a satisfied cat back in its owner's lap. Yes, I'm home, you fuzzy thing. I stand in the doorway and sense all the variegated magical signatures floating around the castle like schools of bright fish. I am the only one that can sense them this way, and for one moment I am grateful for this privilege.

Walking with eyes closed I move unerringly down the stone passageways, avoiding the warm, beckoning presence of magic that reaches me through the fog that is already winding around me. I make it to my room and only open my eyes when the door responds to my touch. My books are piled there and a few of the headier research tomes are sitting up like dogs waiting to be petted. I run my hands over their spines and can almost feel their knowledge breathing in the leather covers like a square bellows. They are here for me. I can touch them and do no harm—maybe even learn something that will help me do good.

That night I sleep very well, knowing that I won't ever seek anything among muggles again. Since my adventures were a complete failure, I resolve to go outside the school grounds to stimulate myself to a preventive orgasm. I find a secluded wood where I can rut into the grass and the dirt and bury the result away from the occasional animal or bird that will wander by curiously.

James and Sirius join me in these solitary ventures. Or at least, their memory does. The taste of their magic will spring to my mouth as clear as if their skin was pressed to my tongue. Once or twice before school ended they saw me coming back to the castle, muddy and quiet, but gave me their usual glare and said nothing about my having just coupled with both of their magics in my mind.

Lilly I have forbidden myself to profane with my perversions even in thought.


	19. Chapter 19

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 19: The Parlor

Hey, Snape," comes the voice in the Slytherin common room. It is a place I studiously avoid and where I am not sure I'm welcome except for the odd all-house meeting, such as this one about the end-of-year festivities. All sixth-years, even one such as myself, at this time receive the mantle of respect from the graduating seniors, who pass on the right to torment all the other students of the house and demand utter servitude in return.

Not expecting anyone to lay in my bed for head count while I go off on a tryst in Hogsmeade, I can't wait for the whole exercise in adolescent gibes and thinly veiled sexual innuendo to be over.

"Snape," comes the whisper again. "Let's be done with this child's play, shall we?"

The whisper comes from right about my ear and gives me an unpleasant tickle. Lucius Malfoy. A childhood illness held him back a year, so he is one year older than the rest of the rising seniors. Almost two years older than me. He always seems to be blazing the trail for the mischief the other Slytherins got into. I only noticed him among all the other students because he seems to be very good at getting others implicated in things that can't be traced to him. Certain pranks that reflect badly upon some of the professors, for instance. There are some professors I don't like, certainly. Some are rather dim. Others nosy. But they are a fact of life when you're a student—why does he hate the instructors so?

All of this is running through my mind as I slowly turn to meet the blue gaze—close, too close. Is he coming on to me? My brain flashes, and then he smiles. It reminds me of my grandmother, a smile meant to put things in their proper place. Anything but sexual.

"Meet me at the edge of school grounds near the lake at 11:00. Be sure you're not followed." And then he winks at me!

My tongue feels furred and black in my mouth as I trudge through the clean black of the grounds at night. Why am I going to this? I ask myself for the hundredth time in the last several hours. It's mostly curiosity about others of my kind—not Alkahests, of course, but wizards who want other wizards. That's the only explanation for this ridiculously hush-hush meeting. At last the other Incongruent students have sorted themselves and now they want to make up for past wrongs with me, the vanguard of their pack.

Will it be hard to rebuff someone really attractive? I'm wondering when a voice comes out of the darkness.

"Is this the one?"

"Yes." It's Lucius' voice. "Turn a little to your left, Snape. Yes, that's just right. Now walk straight ahead."

I do as they say. The ground opens and then I freefall for a few long seconds before landing in a splendid parlor. My fall slows just before I'm about to collide with the ground and I manage to right myself and land gracefully on two feet, even better than Lucius, in fact, who lands next to me. The other man who spoke first, a formally dressed young man in his early twenties, has already found his footing and is moving into the knot of people gathered at the far end of the room. It reminds me of something my grandmother would conjure up. Lots of ostentatious details that self-consciously proclaim their pedigree. Ghastly lamps made up of live Brightbelly birds. One seems to roll his eye at me as I walk up to the throng grouped around an armchair.

"Your entrance does not disappoint, Mr. Snape," says the man in the chair. He is a thoroughly unremarkable looking person—so much so that it's remarkable. His magic, however, is another story. It beats at my awareness like a drove of killer bats. I can almost hear it flapping against my face. Impassively, he watches me adjust to it. Neither of our faces betray anything about the encounter that establishes me as a very rare sort of wizard and him as a very evil sort of man. If this is not a gathering for wizards of my inclinations, I suddenly wish it was, and if it is, I don't want to know in which directions this person's Incongruencies lie.

He gestures and a chair appears for me. I sit. "I've been wanting to meet you for ages, but apparently my ideas are a bit progressive in certain regards." The word progressive amuses him. He lets it hang in the air for a while, looking at all the other people whose fine garments and manners cannot disguise the servile way they follow his movements.

A glass is handed to me and I can sense it is just wine. I take a tiny sip to hide my adjustments and he nods at what he thinks is courage in trusting it is not poison. There are no wards here. I am in a room full of magical people and there is nothing in between their magic and mine. The interplay between our varied signatures is intoxicating. The man is watching me. He knows. He knows I don't get drunk on wine, but something more precious. Oh Hermès Trismégiste, what is he going to do with me? Blackmail? Torture me for sport? Why hasn't anyone told me what to expect with this problem of mine?

"It's all right, look around you," he says. "I won't tell you which ones were opposed to inviting you," a few shoulders stiffen, "but they have come to see things my way."

A larger sip of wine gets rid of the black taste for a moment. He doesn't seem to mind that I'm choking on his dark magic. Nor is he threatening me with it. We just sit there and it winds between us like a skein. If the man was remotely attractive, maybe it would be arousing, but he looks like a Muggle postman or a bus driver. Someone you don't fix on.

"Do you have any contact with your father?" he asks suddenly.

"We haven't spoken since my mother's death when I was ten," I say stiffly. "I don't even know where he is."

"Ah, such a pity, that. Your mother had quite the reputation for her sorcery. A very gifted family, in fact. Your aunt is a linguist, is she not?"

No one knows this much about my family, my mind is flashing a warning.

"But your grandmother was the only one I had the pleasure of meeting," the man continues. "I had the privilege of attending some events where she had provided the orchestra and other refinements. Impossible to find an artist like that nowadays."

"How well did you know her?" I ask, trying to place his age.

"We shared certain affinities," he replies. "It took me a while to make the connection between you and Madame Hercula Laurent because, while she mentioned a grandson, she did not mention the particularities of his birth, strangely."

That my grandmother obscured the fact that my father was a muggle surprises me not at all. "I'm surprised she would speak of me," I remark. "She had a peculiar way of showing regard, if it was that."

"Oh, make no mistake, she was very impressed with your intellect and your magic. I thought it only a matter of time before you found your way to us, but Lucius was the one to make the connection between the gifted wizard-boy I heard about so long ago and the Half-blood student in his house."

At his name, Lucius glides over soundlessly. "Snape is very studious," he says. "It was nearly impossible to get his attention."

"Must be the muggle blood," I drawl. "Thickens the senses, or so I hear."

Lucius blanches and I expect the man to defend his little worldview and then we will part ways and I can go home. But he just sits there as if every reaction of mine has been meticulously anticipated.

"Just tell me one thing. One thing and then you can go back to your books and your potions," the man says. His colorless eyes pierce mine. "Were you a happy child?"

A guffaw escapes my lips and several people turn in shock. "Even someone who hasn't pried into my past as you obviously have knows I came to Hogwarts dirty, lice-infested and half-feral," I say. "There's a _Daily Prophet_ article about it—'Boy Raised by Werewolves Taken in as Charity Case by Wizarding School.' Surely you read the whole series."

"I read that you took your first life at ten," he says in a bland voice. No one has ever expressed it so clearly to me, but it especially hurts the way he says "first," as if I'm a career criminal in the making. My breathing is the only thing I hear for a moment. All eyes are on us again. Lucius appears to be experiencing some odd kind of arousal. He senses my eyes on him and turns. Is he attracted to me? my mind asks again.

"You'd do it again," the man continues. "If I gave you a beautiful man," his hand strokes Lucius cheek, who smiles a very little, "right now, you'd have him wouldn't you?"

Confused, I tear my eyes from Lucius' blue irises. "I thought we were talking about me the murderer, not me the homosexual," I say, both words ringing out in the room. Glances are exchanged but no one says a word.

"I have him, he has me, I can't see what difference it could possibly make to you," I proceed to fill the odd silence, shifting in my chair. Lucius is so—present—to me. He is sitting with his legs open on some grotesque little settee and I can almost hear the blood vessels in his organ swelling to their full saturation.

"Show me," the man says and flicks his wand at Lucius and then at me. We are naked and the people are crowding round. This is not what I want—I'm not a sideshow! Exhibitionism is not one of my Incongruencies! Neither is sunning my privates in front of the fairer sex. I don't want women to see me like this, but apparently my penis has other ideas, because it's practically rearing towards Lucius, who is laughing a little. Just like James. Like someone has asked him to put the sublime into ten words or less. To make him stop laughing like that I close my mouth over his.

It is a dark conversation our tongues have together.

But unlike with the muggles, our magic is swishing and humming all around us. His is a new note I add to my symphony of stolen songs. It is not without beauty, but there is something doomed and inward-turning about it—

I turn him over and the man claps his hands at the spectacle. I'd forgotten he was there, anyone was there. The words for a lubricating spell come back to me from another life when I was with James, and, the condom is forgotten like every other rational or ethical consideration.

My body is searching desperately in him for something that seems like James, like Sirius, but instead I'm drowning in this alien flesh and strange magic. I take a deep breath and master my fear a little. Only then do I realize how much my teenage body needs this. Some responsible resolve begins to break. Dumbledore is not here, and I am a young man with a raging sexual appetite. This is a willing participant and it's not at school and I deserve this. Everyone else can have this.

Without caring to bring Lucius any pleasure I do something right and he makes his own particular sound that I file next to other men's moans. Soon there is no him and there is no me, we are only this roiling mass of flesh and lust and magic.

If there's something left off that list I don't feel it now.

I cry out.

Lucius merely detaches from me and then gives me the same treatment. There are no refinements. This is not making love. This is Lucius merging with his every desire, and there is me shuddering with the magic he's pouring into me with not a thought to what it might cost him tomorrow.

Then I'm suddenly aware that I am sitting naked on a Persian carpet next to another nude man I don't even like. And at least twenty people I also probably don't like are watching.

The man in the armchair leans over and looks at Lucius. "How do you feel?"

The blond young man starts that breathy laughter and the man holds up his hand. "Cast something for me," he says.

Lucius feels around in the tangle of robes nearby and holds his wand unsteadily. "Wingardium Leviosa," he says, pointing at one of the hideous lamps. Nothing happens. Pulling himself together, he says with more focus, "Wingardium Leviosa." He frowns and pulls on his clothes so he can stand and focus. "Wingardium Leviosa," A pitiful spark comes from his wand.

Watching Lucius out of the corner of his eye, the man commands me, "Cast a spell." Not wanting to reveal my wandless magic, I search for my wand within my clothes and decide to conjure a harmless teapot. It's not like I've ever particularly gifted at conjuring, but this time the teapot comes out in ornate silver, with a full tea service, and delicate porcelain cups appear in everyone's hands. The man notes my astonishment. "Never taken after your grandmother before now, have you?"

"No, not in the slightest," I say.

Lucius is pointing his wand here and there trying to do the simplest first-year charms. He looks desperate, then annoyed, at being temporarily rendered a muggle, but when he meets my eyes his expression softens.

Every action James or Sirius or even Lilly directed towards me was as good as drugged, comes the awful thought.

"Splendid," the man is saying, and at last I am clothed again. "I don't need to ask you how you feel," he says with a knowing air to me.

Then he must be much wiser than me I, because I don't know how I feel at that moment, or on the journey home with a Lucius whose attentions already bother me, and even in my solitary bed. I feel sated—the sense of drowning in my own desire for union that I normally push to the back of my mind is gone, but I know I have done a bad thing. My body feels filthy with my weakness and the essence of a random student. This dark wizard knows all about me and can't be lending his carpet for my sexual therapy out of the goodness of his heart.

"You are welcome any time," the man says before I get dressed. "Oh, mind the carpet."

It appears everything in the parlor was conjured. There are holes in the rug made of magic where Lucius and I were together.

Before I go to sleep I scrub myself raw with every purifying potion I can think of.

When Dumbledore next insinuates about a "nice Muggle chap" I am noncommittal.

_O extreme madness! what, I pray you, constrains you to seek to perfect the foresaid things by strange melancholical and fantastical regiments! as one says: Woe to you that will overcome nature, and make metals more then perfect by a new regiment, or work sprung from your own senseless brains. God has given to nature a straight way, to wit, continual concoction, and you like fools despise it, or else know it not._

_The Mirror of Alchemy, composed by the famous Friar, Roger Bacon, sometime fellow of Martin College and Brasen-nase College in Oxenforde.  
><em>  
>Then exams are finally here and it takes a great deal of willpower not to excel in every subject to a suspicious extent because of Lucius' stolen magic on top of Lilly's. Lessmore is arranging for me to intern with her at Hogwarts and in her Hogsmeade practice, so this is my first summer at the castle.<p>

Before everyone leaves I'm afraid Lucius will bother me again, or perhaps reproach me if his exams went badly because his magic levels were down, but he departs without saying goodbye. Not that any new closeness with him would make any of Slytherins suspect anything sexual between us. Everyone pretends to be "in the know" about this secret society that regularly recruits from our house.

Even I had heard about it. But my own father had been a member of some secret Guild or other and all they did was drink the odd pint or two and have a charity drive once a year. Like any effort to band together, it seemed frivolous to me, and certainly unlikely to want me to join.

But join they want me to. Lucius owls me several times from his home and I have to convince him that the school would sense it if I broke my promise to Dumbledore about sex in the castle. He is just paranoid enough to swallow that suspicion of mine without a fight. His parents' house is obviously out for reasons we need not discuss. This leaves outside school grounds, and he refuses to roll in the grass somewhere. We go to a muggle inn a couple times but Lucius' distaste for muggles makes that intolerable. So we see each other a few times at the beginning of the summer in the underground parlor belonging to the man that Lucius feels a slavish devotion to, and to me is the black taste of my fate.

At the very least, abandoning any pretense that love is possible for me is teaching me a lot about myself. In my visits to the man's parlor, I quickly learn that I have a limitless sexual stamina even beyond that of boys my age. That it is indeed possible for me to be with a woman, though I do not enjoy it the way I am sure I would have with Lilly. And that after having several people in one night, I can feel like one of the gods for a while.

There is no spell that is beyond me for this time. I am even gifted at transfiguration, and just knowing that I could walk through a crowd of my fellow students and not have them look at me in disgust tells me that the other Alkahest who attended school at Hogwarts long ago must have found transfiguration useful for this very reason and made a note of it that came down to my time.

Would that I could maintain that level of focus without having to drain six or seven assorted humans first.

The man accepted my introduction of prophylactics on my second visit after I told him that the operative factor in the magical exchange isn't my bodily fluids, and that I fear others stealing some unspecified power from me by either preserving any amount of bodily fluid from me or contaminating my system with theirs. As maniacal as he is about power, this seems plausible to the evil postman, and the people I take are roughly just as drained afterwards.

Maybe that is because I'm developing a taste for what I'm stealing from them. I'm learning to savor the bouquet of each wizard or witch's magic. Some are more passive, or more active in their Spagyrics. More hot or cold. Now that my sexual harvest isn't distracted by emotions it is easy to Divise their energy according to the color of their true nature. Lucius is yellow. One woman who my mind can see is beautiful in a cold way, she is a turquoise blue. Some of the ones I don't like so well are red. But they all come to me and offer themselves completely unguarded, so that it's impossible for me to say they are unworthy. I'm inside their very nature, I'm in their magic and they are in me.

In exchange, they get to possess their heart's desire. Lovers lost to death or heartbreak come alive for a few moments in my body, and if I weren't so focused on the magical landscapes that open up to me, limitless and singular, for the duration of this short act, I would be awed by acting as the canvas for these imaginings. Whatever you think you know about these people who are loyal to darkness is probably true, but what is also true is that in my arms most of them made love to love. Very few actually coupled with their own exalted image, or with the postman, or some things that were even worse.

I'm doing them a service, I rationalize. Life has so little joy, don't I know, that if someone gave me a chance to exchange a little magic for a few unsullied moments with James or Lilly, I'd be there at least once a week.

The man gives me one after another and he suggests things. Just ideas. He doesn't care what organ goes where. As far as I can tell he is physically unmoved by all the couplings going on. He is just thoughtful, observant and very, very careful not to touch me.

"Can you read his thoughts?" he asks me as a man is losing himself in me.

I consider this and say calmly, "How would I know? It's like a river that rushes very fast—it's hard to separate what's me and what's not."

This has long since stopped being about kissing and panting and anything clumsy and intimate for me. What I get in that parlor is not the love or sensuality I'm so sorely missing. It's a simple equation: performing certain actions produces a powerful result. It's like any magical lesson I've ever had, except there is a lot of thrusting with a stranger making that little laugh that bothers me so.

The postman considers. "Have you ever betrayed me?" he asks my partner, a beefy sort of wizard who seems a reliable pawn but nothing more.

The man is making jerky movements and seems close to climax. He babbles something. As he flows into me I get a clear picture. He has a child he's told the man is a halfwit, but is really a son he doesn't want to get involved in this—this group. The boy is perfectly normal and is at a school in Switzerland.

"Anything?" the dark wizard asks me.

"Just the usual drivel coming from a man satisfying himself," I say drily.

It's one thing for me to be an Incongruent, but quite another to send people to what I assume would be their death.

At least, that's what I think at the time. The wizard with the boy seems a thoroughly heterosexual man utterly mystified by finding himself naked and sated next to me. His mind opened itself up to me and probably with a little work I could have gotten all of his secrets. I could have keys to Gringott vaults and blackmail material besides. I could be rich.

Rich, sexually satisfied, and without love.

The irony that was painfully present through most of these experiences was that they showed me the love everyone, even the lowest toady in the parlor, could have, but which was denied me.

Something precious in me that barely started to sprout with James, that died on the vine with Lilly, is being pressed on all sides by the black feeling from the man.

And none of the remaining staff at Hogwarts saw a thing.

This was one of the last bits of childhood I shed—realizing it is possible to lie and not get caught. The great Dumbledore and his great stone lair, all of its inhabitants down to the smallest spider—

None of them could tell a thing. Perhaps this is what it is like to have a private sex life, I think—something I'd scarcely dared imagine for myself. But that was impossible and I knew it. I was just partaking of so much magic that it merely took a thought to balance the school's magical grid out again when I came and went with my powerful signature.

After all, I was made to blend—The stone walls became a little thicker, the house elves were unusually tractable, the greenhouse and grounds were more fertile and the magical workmen who came in every summer to tend to the aged castle hummed with their work. Everything became a little more itself.

The wards were there but I could walk around them, in a way, but there was no reason to remove them and alert Dumbledore's attention, as it surely would have even on the weeks he was traveling. All I wanted was to work with Lessmore on our chosen field: Human Spagyrics.

After the first of the summer I stopped going to the secret parlor. Once the frustrations of school wore off, my desire to spend every bit of my attention in my laboratory won out and no one, not even the dark magician, could approach me there. The magic I had built up was too powerful.

Every day I advanced the existing knowledge of the nature of individualized magic by a mile. I discovered new qualities that could be used for organizing people. By evoking someone I had coupled with I could reproduce their signature by searching for the piece of their magic that had broken off and lodged in me. Using my wand I could pull it out in a strand like one stores a memory in a Pensieve. This was easier to do soon after the "interchange," as I called it, but with some concentration I could locate each person's magic swimming in my sea like a colored fish.

These samples were stored in my own filing system, a cloud of glittering bits of magic I have safely preserved in a neutral substrate of my own discovery. This collection lives in the corner of the laboratory that I could shuffle according to magical color, active versus passive, cold versus hot. By holding a jar of blue-natured potion, for instance, near my little menagerie, all the blue magics will surface, attracted by the similar magic. It's everything the ancients either tried very hard to hide, or didn't have the technology to reproduce for others. Now that we have some method of testing different remedies, it greatly expands the possibilities for working without using real people as guinea pigs, as presumably most Spagyrists had to do at some Spagyrists had to do at some point.


	20. Chapter 20

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 20: The Mercies

But the summer was not only dedicated to theory. Lessmore had finally contracted me as her assistant after unknown threats to her nursing guild, and after a delay of a few weeks from convincing the nursing authority to let a harmful creature attend the sick, I knew I couldn't let her down.

The evening before my first day as an apprentice, the nurse came to my laboratory, which, since I'd scarcely slept for weeks, was now in full swing with my research projects. It was her first time going in this space I'd gradually appropriated over the last year and she knocked at the door timidly.

"Madam, you are now my employer and you are always a friend. The wards have been keyed to your signature for a long time."

"Is that—is that it?" Her eyes are on the glittering matrix. Since I enjoyed sucking out the samples and now delight in the magic swimming in me, I know that they're beautiful. But she has tears in her eyes.

"I can finally see what you see," she says.

Touched, I lead her through the different qualities and show her the more active ones moving more quickly, the colder ones she can feel by holding her hand up to them.

"Tell me again how you make them? Now that I see the different qualities maybe it will make more sense."

I point to one of the duller samples, a green active cold, which I've secretly based on her. "My mind has a knack for remembering someone's Spagyrics once they become clear to me. It takes some experimentation but it is possible to create a potion that mimicks these properties, though I often have to dye the compound to make it appear to the naked eye the way it feels to my instinct."

Most of the samples are much brighter because they are real magic, not a similacrum. Any magical person would be able to sense this real magic and thus have the reaction that Lessmore is having: this is the basis for our civilization, this is what fuels our bodies at least as much as blood and air. This is what commands us to follow it and this is the power that we command when we cast a spell.

The nurse accepts the cup of calming tea and sits in a chair. "You must know that I'm as nervous about tomorrow as you. Not because I think you will disappoint," she reacts to my frown, "but because I don't know how your abilities and your research will interact with everything I know. I'm just as excited as I was when I first started practicing! Even the most mundane wand-burn could open up to a whole new world."

"My dear friend, anything or nothing may happen, but I will put my all into it."

"Don't. Please don't. Go outside a little every day. Promise me. You and I are very much alike in that way, Severus. We need fresh air."

She never talks about herself, so I decide to take advantage of the occasion, knowing that she is very private and seems to be very comfortable with our current distant friendship. "You have never mentioned this before, and I long to hear about you traipsing through the meadows as a girl. Will you tell me a little?"

"There's not much to tell," she says and I fear this will be the end of it but then she reaches for one of the biscuits I keep in a tin. "I was outside whether I liked it or not because I grew up on a farm. First it belonged to my mother, and when she died, my stepfather and I didn't get on, so I moved in with my aunt and her family, still in Yorkshire, on their farm. I complained about it mightily, but I enjoyed waking up early in the morning and knowing I was needed. That there was something important to do."

She looks at me shyly and sees me completely still, soaking up this knowledge about this person who probably knows me better than anyone. The thought of what she doesn't know—where I go sometimes at night, where the magic comes from—is banished like the mote of dust that it is.

"That's probably why I chose to become a nurse—everything is so wonderfully simple when you're needed. Do you know they've done studies and the magic generated by a nurse or doctor in a crisis situation is practically superhuman? It was a rather unethical study because adding any magical substance to a treatment area without the practitioner's knowledge can disrupt their spells. Nevertheless, someone put a reactive test substance on the floor where the mediwitches and -wizards were treating patients and the sheer power captured in their footprints was many, many times higher than that produced by these same individuals off duty."

Lessmore never talks about studies with me! Enchanted, I respond, "I hadn't thought of keeping track of practitioners' qualities, but why shouldn't we? How your magic is on a given day is part of the set of variables of the medicine we deliver."

Our new relationship is inspiring for both of us, and we begin to create the language about individualized magical medicine that perhaps no one in the world will ever understand except us.

The nurse has levitated a bottle of Pegason Sherry from the cabinet she doesn't hide from me anymore. I have a glass to accompany her but watch the woman's worn face until it glows a little brighter than normal.

"You mentioned your mother but not your father. Do you care to tell me a little about him?"

She fingers the beaker we've served the sherry in. "My parents were an unusual match at the time—a love match, but neither of their families saw it that way. My mother was from Cape Verde, and my father was part Romanian, part English. He wasn't a gypsy!" she says to my obvious excitement. "But he lived his life much like one. My father traveled around all over the world and somehow ended up on her island. He brought her to England against the wishes of her parents, and some of his family was rather hostile to her, but most were simply cool.

"Why he chose England of all places to settle down, when he hated it so and escaped every chance he got, I don't know. Maybe he thought it would be a help for my mother when they had a family, as they soon did. My mother turned out to like England very much. She took to the farming life and proved herself an excellent administrator. One day when I was very small my father didn't come back from one of his journeys, which he sometimes undertook as a merchant dealing in rarities, and sometimes he didn't give a reason.

"My mother was happy with the way things were with him. I know because after he didn't come back for five years and she married again because she felt she was of an age not to be choosy, I saw her very unhappy with my stepfather. He was a brute and when she died quite suddenly of cancer my father's sister Penelope took me in.

"It was through her that I learned an important lesson: only a few members of my father's family were truly beastly about having an African in-law. The rest were just pure Yorkshire and like many people from the countryside they came off as hard and rather cold at first glance. But my Aunt Penelope treated me as any other child: she was strict but not unfair. If I didn't do my chores properly I got the same punishment as her five children. It was just a very different atmosphere than the one I grew up in: my parents both knew how to laugh. But once I adapted to the routine at Aunt Penny's it was a good life—though I only stayed with them one year because I was called to Hogwarts."

"You were a student here?" I exclaim. "How could you not have told me? Which house?"

"Ravenclaw," she says indulgently. "But one thing you will learn from me as your internship sponsor, is that I don't tolerate tardiness or shirking any more than my aunt did. You should get some rest—you'll need it tomorrow."

"I will," I lie solemnly. Who can sleep when there is so much to discover? Tonight I plan on continuing to hold up test potions with various properties and documenting the reactions in my little flock of captive magics. "And Madam," I call as she is just out the door. She ducks back in. "Thank you."

This new warmth is probably what gets me through my first day with real patients.

We don't even get to sleep through the night. Lessmore is rapping on my door and I don't have time to pretend I've been sleeping before she opens it. "Oh good, you're awake. Pack a bag with whatever you think you might need and be quick about it."

Cursing myself for not having done this earlier, I dump dozens of compounds into a bag along with some wooden spatulas and a few other things, and am about to shrink it down when I see the pelican on a shelf. That packed and bag shrunk, I rush after her so we can make it out the special door she has available to her so she can apparate in case of emergencies.

She has to hold on to one of my braids so that I can get through the magical barriers that don't recognize me yet. "If this mess gets in the way during treatment I'm cutting it off."

When we're on the street in Hogsmeade, I can hear the screaming.

The house with the green shutters.

"What is it exactly we are supposed to do?" I ask belatedly.

"Animal bite," she shoots at me while ushering me towards the house.

A woman lets her in, shaking. She's imploring us to do something but I can't even follow what she's saying because Lessmore is finding her own way towards the awful noises.

Most of the man is a blue, a light blue, passive, warm.

Except his left arm, which is a boiling black mass.

Not only is the man in terrible pain from what I sense is a deadly poison spreading from the bite, but his organism is threatened by the shock and panic.

I can't move.

"Gorgon Lion bite. Nasty business. No known cure," Madam relays while creating a sterile space in midair and setting out the contents of her bag.

"You there, hold this—" she shoves one pole of a magical instrument that is positive on one end, negative on the other. As I've seen her do before, she stretches it over the patient to dispel any still-active curses. One after the other she has me help her set dozens of small silver tops spinning. She conjures with the diagnostic trident and we see the cesspool of poison sucking his magic, and his life, into the hideous wound on his arm.

The woman, who must be his wife, sees it too because she starts wailing.

"Give her something, can't you?" Lessmore snaps.

Obediently I take my potions satchel along with the woman out of the room to give the nurse room to work.

The wife accepts a calming tea and I use a wooden spatula to apply the salve while she runs on about how she knew her husband shouldn't have taken that job as a warden at one of the privately-owned game parks in the countryside. I stay long enough to see her face go blank with relaxation, but I will soon discover that even when I'm not frightened out of my wits the family members never make any sense. There is a void between us. I can feel their worry and fear, but it's like watching someone cry out in a soundproof chamber. My fears can never be their fears.

On this early morning, however, the man's screams are still echoing in my ears and my fear is the worst it had been in a long time. Especially when I go back into the room and find Lessmore looking calmly at the network of spells she has wound around the man, who is no better. She's just taken away his voice for his family's sake.

"Well? Any contribution from you would be welcome at this point. All I've done is stop the spread of the alien magic and incrementally slowed the poison's advance, though prolonging his agony may not be doing him any favors," she says as coolly as if she were talking about the weather.

My potions bag suddenly feels like it weighs a hundred pounds. I rest it on a table and search through the phials and jars with shaking hands. I remember the pelican and its miraculous effect on Lilly.

More confident now, I choose the three compounds that feel right (Hyssop salt is very warm, Canoptic Cedar sap is passive and the Bluest thing I have with me is the gallbladder from a codfish. I mix them with a neutral base before lighting my small crucible. When the steam starts escaping from the nozzle after a quick boil, I use tongs to bring it close to the man, who is aware, if in shock, but unable to move after the nurse's spells.

The vapor steals in between the magical network and shortly his panic starts to subside so that it's not raging against the artificial paralysis.

The nurse nods. "And the arm?"

It's very difficult to separate my instinctive distaste for the Gorgon Lion venom from its actual magical properties, but it is a strong orange, cool, active. Madam Lessmore applies the potions as quickly as I can choose them. At this point it can't do any harm to try anything that occurs to me.

When the blackness recedes to just below the elbow I am ecstatic.

"Well done, he'll still have half an arm," the nurse grunts. "You're going to have to hold him down while I cut the rest off."

"I can't touch him!" I say, more horrified at that prospect than the amputation.

She gives me her first look of real annoyance. "Think of something."

She starts mumbling while she purifies her wand. I try using my hand-magic but since it's an attack from a magical animal the man has suffered, his whole body recoils from sensing another alien magic directly from the source, as it were, rather than mediated by a wand like the nurse's. My heart pounding, I can hear the nurse's chanting start to become louder. What is she saying? I've never heard her speak while treating someone.

"I'm ready!" she says.

In a flash, a blanket is cut into shreds, I've poured a strengthening potion on the strips, and each is applied to one of his other limbs. My left hand keeps those in place by directing magic at the fabric, but I use my right hand to point a huge outlay of energy to hold the two bands on the man's left shoulder and hand.

"Aren't you going to anesthetize him?" I ask, horrified.

She nurse twists her mouth at me and says something in the language she's been speaking all this time.

The body goes inert.

"Don't be fooled—in an ordinary surgery the spell might hold, but his body is at war with this poison and neither is going to take kindly to being distracted."

The magic that I've been draining in my sneaking little sexual assignations is thus put to good use.

The being of the patient (as I started to think of him at some point) rails against every cut inflicted with hairs-breadth precision by the nurse's wand. She has the wound all opened up and we can see the little knot of foreign magic writhing there.

"Can't you just take it out?"

"And link it to my wand, the surest channel into my magic? Madness."

Using all of my concentration I keep my hands where they are and levitate al jar over to the operation site. Unscrewing a cap is much more difficult to do with the mind, but while Lessmore fires off a series of charms that seemed to be for cleaning the wound, I manage to open the bottle that I just happen to have with me.

"What do you plan on doing with that?" she asked, immersed in her work.

"I'm going to pick it up."

"Severus, even you—!"

"Every feline I've ever met was a Passive. This lion must be no different. I'm going to keep the other two variables I sense in the poison the same—orange and cool—and see what happens. The poison itself is an active substance because that's what venoms do. The worst thing that can happen is nothing," I lie, suddenly prey to a strange feeling that nothing should stop this thing I am about to do.

Her wand poised to begin cutting, I use my mind to carefully scoop the offending magic into the potion, which swallows it with a hiss.

"Huh," Madam says.

I watch the blackness recede much more quickly under the nurse's healing charms. The fingers and hand, sadly, were without clean bloodflow for too long.

"I'm proud of you, Severus," the nurse says when we've gone out for a breath of fresh air and I'm vomiting in the grass. "You didn't get sick while we removed the hand."

I sit down heavily and put my head between my knees. "I could have been of so much more help but I was frightened out of my wits," I murmur into my trousers.

"You'll be frightened every time, but soon you'll stop being surprised by it and you'll have more attention left for work."

At the intonation she gives "work" I look up. This is her life's calling and we're sharing it now.

"Here," she says, all business again. "Smell this." She puts a phial under my nose. The sharp smell and highly active nature of the compound have me clear-headed and on my feet in seconds.

"What on earth is that? Is it legal?"

She laughs delightedly. "It's a patented formula not even you could probably replicate. Nurses have their version, doctors have another, but it helps you regain your focus when you've lost it treating patients. Traditionally, one is supposed to say, 'For my charge, let me be recharged.'"

"For my charge, let me be recharged," I repeat, awed that any guild would let me mouth their incantations. Lessmore turns away quickly and settles a stray curl.

We go back inside to gather our things and leave a written set of instructions to the wife, Evelyn, for how to care for her husband, Peter Worslot, as he recovers. Now Lessmore is all warmth, putting her arm around the woman, giving her contacts for a magical prosthesis, and promising to look in on them tomorrow.

"Thank you," the woman calls between sniffles as we're walking up the drive.

"Where are we going next?" I ask when I've got the smell of all those potions and effluvia out of my nose.

"We're going to eat something. No arguments." After seeing the nurse in action, I will never argue with this phenomenon that I now realize she is.

We have strong tea in a café and she orders me a sandwich, but I beg her to let me leave out the meat.

"There, your color is back," she says approvingly after I've wolfed down the food I didn't think I could possibly stomach. "You've been pale as a ghost since we walked in the Worslot's door."

"Why could I not hear their names until right before they left? I'm sure Mrs. Worslot was calling her husband's name, but it was like my mind couldn't capture it."

"Nurses call it one of the Mercies granted to practitioners: the idea is that it happens so that you can't get attached to the patients or their families until you've done your best for them."

"What language was that you were speaking?" I ask as we go towards one of the scheduled stops.

"It's called Khemnu, and it's not on your Rosetta ring. It's a trade language passed down through our training guild; doctors have their own, which is perhaps why we don't always get along so well. This was actually an unusual call; if I had known exactly what we were walking into or felt there was time I would have brought him to a hospital or called a doctor and a medical team. You saw how much we could have used more hands and a better setting. A real hospital doesn't allow family members to distract the healing process."

By the time we return to the castle after a few routine consults I am emotionally drained but physically intact. Together, we mix a quick potion based on Lessmore's experience and my intuition and anoint my forehead and wand hand. We catch each other smiling at how good it feels to collaborate like this.

"What did you give him, in that glass contraption?" she asks.

"I'm not sure. I was—"

"Scared to death," she finishes, smiling. "You know, it's always going to be hectic like that, but we need to start keeping track of what you use in the personalized compounds, what the individuals' signature is like and then what we observe. That's what your area of study is, isn't it?"

Feeling the calm seeping into my skull and moving lazily over to my heart, I nod, awed by my good fortune at having one person, even if only one, who understands me.

She gets up to go. "Real life is somewhat different than school, isn't it, young Master Snape?"

"Yes, but today was really real," I say nonsensically.

She strokes my hair and I would give anything to be able to throw my arms around her waist and tell the fabric of her robe how much her friendship means to me.

"I know you and Dumbledore have had your differences, but since his tenure began at this school, there have been very few deaths and irreversible injuries. The headmaster has a genius for balance, and he's managed to make my position very easy compared to normal nursing assignments. This summer is going to be a real contrast for you."

When she is gone I stretch out on the cot in my laboratory and sleep the sleep of the just. I know because it is the way I remember dreaming before puberty. My grandmother and I are walking by the seaside. She is naming the creatures associated with the different shells and telling me deliciously eerie stories about mermaids and mermen.

When I wake up the magics are flying like tropical birds in formation, around and around.

Pushing away the thought of where they came from has become the gesture by which I reacquaint myself with the fact that I am alive.

Over the summer I help treat poisonings—accidental and intentional—heal exposure to plants that magically inclined humans are sensitive to, ferret out curses that are at the heart of a physical malady, lend a temporary calm to those afflicted by melancholia, and attend five births.

It was these last where my inability to touch the patient became really bothersome. I flatly refused to use my hand magic anywhere near the woman, though the nurse insisted it was the same as using a wand, so I use my wand, which never feels as natural to me in cases of diagnosis and treatment. In one case I broke a wooden chair into sticks because I ran out of wooden spatulas for the healing salves that did seem to provide some relief for the woman's distress during a breach birth. There were also pressure points the nurse could have used help with, but the idea of exposing a baby to my condition was unthinkable.

Standing there while Lessmore delivered the child was moving each time, in a slightly different way depending on whether the child's father was there, or a female relative, or no one at all. These were all sudden births that would ordinarily have taken place at St. Mungo's, meaning that this little fate was coming out unprepared into a world that wasn't prepared for it. I said a silent prayer every time, wishing that this new piece of earth be rapidly recognized by the earth and gathered to its bosom the way the child was to its mother's. "Be at home, be at home," is basically what my wish amounted to, and the nurse sometimes cried with me.

We also saw three deaths: one, an elderly person who suffered a fall, another from a complicated curse that had been set in motion years ago and which Madam Lessmore and I discovered, too late, lurking under layers and layers of cloaking magic whose only indication was a mild dyspepsia.

The third death had no discernible cause, and the nurse was forced to recognize this in her report to the Ministry. When the ministry official came to perform the routine investigation, I made sure to be somewhere else.

Something about seeing these deaths was somehow worse than my mother's, and causing and witnessing her death was still the yardstick I used to measure all my other horrors. Perhaps it was because I didn't know them, and I could see the earth forgetting a part of itself that it once held close. Perhaps because I am no longer a child blundering around with potions for his mother, but part of a qualified medical team and thus have a real responsibility to treat patients correctly.

At least I am on the right side of these losses. But they make me think of James and Lilly, and how they very nearly suffered the same fate.

This sends me out into the forest, away from the research that was my only love, to perform a preemptive seed-letting for the world's good.

One day Nurse Lessmore recognizes that a patient is suffering some type of infection but she can't determine what kind, so she calls in a doctor.

Now that she's called my attention to it, I do notice that the impenetrable language she uses while casting his spells around the child with an alarming cough is different in cadence to her own, as well as being different than the doctor's.

Watching the two practitioners share the small bedroom is like watching a gryphon and a shark sharing a bed. Their hackles are up from the first moment the woman appears in the doorway, which probably explains why she dismisses me with scarcely a look.

"Did you consider Infectious Boring Fly? Stone-set Gasp? You see the mortar is all gone in these bricks. Albumenulum Deficiency? Inimical Lustre Excess?" The woman is about 40, with short blonde hair and magic I am taking note of because it is sparking against Lessmore's own.

"I have considered all the obvious things," Madam says in a more clipped tone than usual, "and didn't find any of them, hence my request for a second opinion."

"We'll see." The doctor casts spell after spell.

Since I am not busy hurling decades of training against those of someone from another guild, I have the presence of mind to notice: the child is miserable. I make what I think are amusing faces and the little boy stares at me uncertainly, but it's enough to distract him from the unfriendly tones of the two practitioners wrapping him with magic like a mummy and forcing him to inhale and exhale vapors that make him grimace on the way in and wince on the way out.

I increase my efforts at being amusing and the boy definitely decides that I have some sort of grievous condition. He finds this fascinating and I decide my bedside manner isn't so hopeless after all.

None of the doctor's initial diagnostics show any of the basics, which puts Lessmore back on her normal consulting room footing.

"So you see, it isn't any of the usual or unusual things you would think of for a child of eight in this part of the world. I was thinking perhaps a migratory bird tracked along some toxin…"

"A bird! More likely he ingested a bit of something with a spell on it. Have you induced emesis?

"With the boy coughing like a faulty flue? He'll aspirate it, you quack!"

With the professionals furiously casting spell against spell as a way of avoiding hexing each other, the boy and I are making headway together.

"What's your name?" he whispers raggedly.

"Severus. What's yours?" And I nod at the garbled syllables that reach my ear instead of his name.

"What is the matter with you?" he says with all the openness to mixed horror and novelty that is native to a small child.

"That depends on who you ask," I say, mimicking my grandmother's eerie tone when she told the violent fairy tales that so delighted and frightened me.

He bites his lip. "Is it something frightful?" he asks hopefully.

"Truly horrid," I agree and we laugh. "If you won't tell anyone," he shakes his head vehemently and I pick the first three words that come to me. "It's spider's belly dropsy," I intone in a macabre voice, and the boy shivers at the fictional illness.

"Is it very painful?"

"Excruciating," and I make what passes for a funny face from someone who has never made one before.

His laugh turns to a cough and the nurse and the doctor turn to me as one and fulminate me with their eyes and go back to their argument.

"I have a pet spider," the boy whispers through gasps. "His name is Belvedere, and he lives behind my bureau sometimes."

"Oh yes?" I say casually, my heart beating very fast. "What does he look like, this Belvedere? Blue and hairy? Red and rather bony? Pink with so many legs he looks like a flower?"

"That's the one, pink," he croaks, smiling. "I used to have bad dreams but now that I see him come by almost every night I'm not as scared."

"That's good, that's very good," My words are drowned out by a savage coughing fit and his lips are tinged with blood.

"Pardon?" I venture towards the two practitioners and reflexively raise my hands to block one curse each. "I though you might be interested to know that the boy has been having frequent contact with a Rosaceous Spider, the sort known to carry—"

"I know what they're known to carry!" the doctor snaps, practically hurling a new spell at the boy, who cringes towards me.

"Wasting Wrack," Lessmore smirks as if it should have been obvious to the doctor, and stands back to let the other woman confirm the diagnosis.

The nod the nurse grants me means more to me than gold.

Then they are arguing over the treatments and I am forced to intervene because this spider's magic is very much like the boy's—it is a green-passive-cool, hence the sensation of kinship—and this creature's magic has gotten mixed in with the child's.

Since the spider is immune to the Wasting Wrack toxins, these germs come part and parcel with Belvedere's magic, and the result is a tight braid of magics and disease that must be unfurled very carefully. Any remedy will have to be extremely selective in targeting the toxin and not the patient or the spider's trace—they are so similar, in fact, that I didn't sense the difference myself.

None of this is anything I have ever thought consciously before, but now that I know what I'm looking for I move my hands as close to the child as I dare and can barely sense the disease hiding under two nearly identical magics.

"Humph! I've never read of any such thing," the doctor objects, but it must be the sort of power Lessmore told me about, the force that practitioners move with when treating a patient, because I'm rifling through my potions until I come up with two that might work.

"Are you going to use vapors?" the nurse asks.

"Unwise since the lungs are most greatly affected."

When I fire up my crucible and quickly mix a small amount of test potion, the doctor seems to see me, or at least my skill, for the first time. The way I move over a cauldron or crucible carries an undeniable authority.

The boy is lying back against the pillow, his body shaken to the core by coughs, but his eyes follow my every movement. "Is that for me?" I see his mouth say.

"Especially for you."

"Will you cool it to the appropriate temperature and apply it in the usual way first, and only after he exhibits no adverse reaction, over the chest?" I inquire of the nurse.

Madam Lessmore casts a cooling spell and the doctor is so surprised by the application of the paste to the forehead she doesn't think to object.

"Hold up your hands for me," I ask of the boy, and though he is too weak to comply, his right hand gets a fraction of an inch higher off the pillow.

The nurse applies the paste to his wand hand and we wait.

"What are you expecting to happen?" The doctor inquires but Madam Lessmore and I keep an eye on the boy, who is still coughing but seems no worse, for a full five minutes.

"It hasn't made him any worse," the nurse observes. "I'm going to unbutton your nightshirt, is that all right?" she says to the patient.

He looks at me and I nod. "Y- ack ack ack ack," he wheezes.

The doctor helps open the boy's shirt and the nurse applies a good coat of salve to his chest.

"Tickles," he whispers.

"You're doing very well," I tell him as his thin chest rises and falls audibly with the sound of a crackling fire.

Our patient nods and smiles and then he is asleep.

The two women show that they are capable of doing things without audibly arguing and heap whispered spell upon spell, trying to determine if this is a restful sleep or the slide into a coma.

"Belvedere, tickles," the boy says in a clear voice.

"Not a coma," Lessmore mouths while casting more diagnostics but the doctor is too busy trying to place me.

"Whoever heard of using external salves for anything other than skin conditions?" she whispers.

"My mother always used to quote the Great Physick, who in turn cited the Book of the Seven Treatises by Hermes the Thrice Great: apparently this discloses the secret of ferments, which are best in paste form," I say, remembering the random thoughts that would float at me from my mother's mind while she could still think. "She relied on unguents of all kinds, though I think this pattern of application may have been her own innovation. My mother went to the Invisible School,"

The nod the doctor gives me is going to go in the birthday letter I write to my mother this year.

We turn back to the nurse, who has just taken the boy's temperature. "The fever is going down, albeit very slowly."

"Allow me," the doctor says, and reaches in her pocket for a phial of dust—something I can't categorize at all. She throws a pinch up in the air and casts a spell at the same moment. A cooling mist hovers around the patient. She actually smiles at my curious look. "Guild formula, but perhaps you will learn the secret one day."

All three of us give treatment instructions to the worried parents, but I'm the only one with a word of mercy for the spider.

I am overruled.

Lessmore buys me lunch at a tavern and we laugh ourselves silly at the doctor's expense.

"It simply killed her wanting to know your techniques, but she was too proud to ask all of her questions," the nurse says over a savory pie.

"She may be a bit impatient, but you have been known to snap at me in front of a patient too," I point out. "Would you have hexed me for interrupting you?"

"Never! I am not pompous like that Doctor Panderous," Lessmore's eyes challenge me to disagree. "But she did intimate that you might someday enter the doctor's guild. High praise from that lot."

"Why do doctors and nurses get along so poorly?" I ask.

"Well, it all goes back to the time of the Great Tribulation," she says, gathering up her things in preparation for our next patient. "After a war between our professions, it was decided that nurses should have primacy over births, and doctors over deaths."

"Either of you could have treated the condition once you'd found it," I point out. "The spider was just a very unusual creature drawn by the child's magic, but the toxin was there to be discovered by one of your diagnostic tools eventually."

"Then what do you think you did?" she answers a question with a question in that way that drives me mad sometimes now that she is my teacher.

"Talked to him. It was chance I told him I was suffering from a rare illness caught from a spider. It was intuition, really."

Her mind already on the elderly lady with a kidney ailment whom we visit every Thursday, the nurse merely replies, "And you think something other than intuition is what guides even the most educated practitioner? Those doctors won't admit it, but then they have to measure everything. If that woman knew you were measuring what you sensed the child needed so we can add it to our records, instead of following a predetermined recipes, she'd have booted you out of the room."

I will not be entering that guild.


	21. Chapter 21

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 21: A Deluge of Owls

Only when Madam comes in to my laboratory for her favorite soothing vapor that evening do I take up the thread of our earlier conversation. "Why is it practically everything in Wizard culture goes back to the Time of Tribulation, but no one can even agree on why it happened?"

"If a wizard knows his faults he'll certainly not share them with anyone else for fear of them being used against him," Madam Lessmore says with the heterodox air I love in her. "Perhaps it's something similar."

"Indeed." And I tell her my theory about the venereal outbreak that might have been at the root of the wars known as the Tribulation.

"That's a fascinating idea." She is suddenly animated. We discuss various possibilities and then she breaks off. "It's a shame we couldn't publish something like that, but it would cause mayhem, all that apparent justification of anti-muggle sentiment."

"I wasn't proposing to tell anyone but you."

Madam fidgets.

"Well, I've been meaning to tell you, Severus; the records I've been keeping of our summer exploits have begun to take the shape of monographs," the nurse says, suddenly nervous. "I'll bring them tomorrow—we can discuss them then." And she is gone.

As usual I have a full night of experimentation ahead of me, one of the best ways to block out all worries from my mind, so I don't think of it that night or the next day, when we have a contagious curse two children got out of a book somewhere and subsequently infected most of their peers.

Lessmore produces a tiny packet from her robe and reconstitutes it while I prepare us each a rejuvenating tea in my laboratory. If I'm exhausted, the fifty-something nurse must be tired as well, though she seems to have the stamina of a Dromedary Moose.

"These are your notes, then?" I ask, reaching for the parchments. Her eyes are on me as my face falls. "'A Proposed Mechanism for Variations in Antigen Response, by Severus Snape and Madame Aramis Lessmore'; 'Hot or Cold, Complementary or Congruent: The Complex Chemistry of Cutaneous Conditions, by Madam Aramis Lessmore and—' Lessmore explain yourself!"

"That title was a bit overly clever but they like that sort of thing at the Wizarding Physick Monthly."

"You have submitted these, these sketches, these fragments, to accredited journals WITH my name and WITHOUT my consent?"

"There's nothing wrong with the data. It's everything I've been submitting to you as part of our division of labor—you track what ingredients you use and in what amounts, and I organize it and give it back to you, with a few suggestions from me, for your further study."

Speechless with rage and betrayal, I paw through the documents. "These are all in a ridiculously preliminary stage. They're mere suggestions! Things we've discussed over tea! It's embarrassing! I'm writing a retraction this moment."

All of the parchments are in her hands and she is looking at me with a new danger in her eyes. "I knew you wouldn't understand. Of course they're very preliminary. Of course they need double-blind studies, if possible, controlled conditions, larger study samples—do you have access to those things? Because this small rural practice is all I can offer you." Her eyes soften slightly. "This is the way you attract attention from the people who can get you all the things you need for your work. They can get you in a school, even, or at the very least a grant to expand your laboratory here. I took a step without your permission because I knew you would never allow it."

I open my mouth. She raises her hand. "If you look at all the monographs, our names alternate in sequence because I knew neither of us would agree to be first."

I slump back in my chair, defeated. Blast this woman for knowing me so well! "Has there been any response?"

She laughs. "Oh, no, you don't know how these academics work. Everything is very slow. Today's outbreak of Clinging Carbuncles would make an excellent follow up to the first article we sent to the Nursing Journal—a much larger sample size to illustrate that some children needed a different kind of remedy."

That's all it takes for the world to fall away and she leaves me after an hour of excited debate, each of us promising to write half of a monograph over the weekend and combine it on Monday.

By Tuesday, it's been sent. I feel rather pleased with myself. Lessmore made it readable, of course, but I'm the co-author of an article! To a dusty publication read by only the most arcane minds in Wizarding Europe.

On Wednesday, it's all forgotten because we are attending the arduous and (for me) terrifying breach birth. When the child and mother survive I have to leave the room because I'm laughing—that breathy laugh like James and the other boys used to direct at me. It's just too huge, what the nurse accomplished that day.

On Thursday morning we happen to be spending a little extra time upstairs in the infirmary because Madam Lessmore has thought perhaps I would get in the way less during her incantations if I knew which movements to expect from her. She's miming through the gestures slowly when I happen to look over her shoulder at the window. "Look out!" is all I can think of to say, and in a flash, we've both hurled a bolt of our magicks to throw up the window sash just in time.

A deluge of owls sweeps into the room, scattering their envelopes all over the cots.

We have to leave the window open when we rush off to our first appointment, and only at lunch can we open some of the packets the nurse had the foresight to scoop into her bag.

"_My dear dilettantes,_

_Thank you for the most entertaining fairy story I have read since I was a babe. The idea that a Creeping Curse could be treated by anything other than a good strong syrup made of a basic solution to flush out the offending toxin is not only completely improbable but a foolish waste of time considering all of the pressing concerns true scientists grapple with for the good of Wizarding Society every day. Nevertheless, my taste in literature has always run to the fantastic, so I pray you, engage your minds in that direction instead._

_Ever himself,_

_The Honorable Professor-Physician Bactrius L. W. N. Gromwick"_

"Oh, Lessmore, I'm so sorry," I begin, not sure why I feel I've let her down when this publishing business was her idea.

She has a huge smile on her face.

"This one is good:

_The addition of this so called booster ingredient for the (as far as a mere scientist can tell, completely random) subgroup of patients reminds me of the child's habit of repeating a spell more than once because the inexperienced caster thinks mere repetition is the source of magic. It stands to reason that one group receives the best formulation of the remedy (the one with this fabled potentiator ingredient, or the original) and the other is the unfortunate control group. The fact that both of your groups had similarly good outcomes probably means your potentiator is useless, or that your data is flawed. Should you wish to learn more about the deductive method, please consult my children's textbook, 'Bending the Mind to Logic,' and feel free to let me know if it was not sufficiently elementary for you._

_From Hildegarde von Uppingbrau, Dean, Nursing Academy, Lowenbrau, Bavaria"_

Lessmore's cackle drowns out my moan that this must be what it's like to receive a Howler.

"Isn't it grand? It's like a dream come true!" And then she's showing that she did inherit her parents' talent for laughter. When she comes up for air and catches my expression she's off in another paroxysm. "They'll debate that black is white and your head is your heel if they think you're casting aspersions on their existing publications, and now they obviously smell the possibility of a new, a new—"

"Do I need to give you a tonic?" I ask drily.

"Oh and this one, from Professor Belligerus Bick. I treated him when I worked as resident nurse at the Hallowed University of the Hebrides. He used to call me his 'bustling hell-bitch whose only talent was shattering his concentration with my poking and prodding.' I wonder how he is."

"He should be hoping to never cross my path," I reply with venom. How dare he speak to Lessmore in such a way?

She begins to calm down at last. "Severus, I knew you wouldn't understand. These people, all they do is write nasty letters and heated articles back and forth to each other when they're not undertaking exactly what Gromwick said—the work that keeps our world moving ahead. Novel ideas make any civilization work, and we have so few in our society. That they come from crusty old souls with an odd sense of humor just helps separate those in the know from the amateurs. Insults are the scholar's Guild Language."

"Then I must be a hopeless dilettante because I see no humor in being invited to read a children's textbook."

She begins picking at her food again. "You see, this is exactly why you never got on with your Aunt Adele. She was a scholar, of sorts, and no doubt studied with these kind of people for a time. It rubs off on you, the banter, and underneath they're all so sensitive. You just have to keep in mind—academics are like children. If you imagine them with a tail, then they become the nice kind of beastly."

"My feeling is that Aunt Adele was always the wrong kind of beastly, tail or no tail!"

We finish our lunch while passing letters back and forth. They all do end with some kind of invitation to further embarrass ourselves, I suppose.

"Madam," I venture as we move on to the next patient. "Miss Bundle is a scholar, is she not? To have learned as much as she has at such a young age she must be, yet she's always been very straightforward with me. We get along quite well, in fact."

"Well, that's because you have something she wants," Nurse Lessmore reproaches, shooting me a look that communicates everything she's surmised about my relationship with the librarian. "You'd be kicked out of the guild for pandering to an addict like that."

That evening we return to a cold infirmary and piles of letters mixed with feathers. "Now we have to answer them all," she says brightly.

"Madam, I must intervene. You put in a strenuous day of work, often accompany me in my research at night, and then I have every reason to think you spend the rest of your time organizing data and writing. These letters are not so important for you to risk your health with another responsibility, and I can't be bothered with them." I've been sneaking various supplements into the teas I make for my friend, concerned that she is not of an age to be pushing herself so hard, but she seems to be in the flush of her prime when it comes to our research.

"Oh, don't worry, Severus, there's an old technique we can make use of," the nurse says mysteriously. "And don't you want to send a few choice words back to these academics?" She staves off my sudden enthusiasm. "I'll show you next time."

We have Friday and Saturday off so on Sunday, after very easy rounds, the nurse introduces me to a technique used by people with a busy correspondence: the Quisquam Quill.

"I wrote several responses on my own, and the quill began to grasp my syntax and tone to the point where it wrote this on its own:

"_Thank you very much for your amusing risposte to our theory, but I am afraid your reasoning is entirely unsound. You of all people should recognize that the Theory of Individual Direction, accepted by all scientists of stature since the beginning of last century, says that each person's unique magic plays some part in their reaction to pathogens and to medicaments. We are sorry that you have wasted your time with supposed 'Paracelsan' texts written by charlatans for the credulous. Please consult the more complete list of references below in addition to those cited in our article._

_Wishing you an enjoyable dip into the pure waters of the true alchemical tradition,_

_Madam Aramis B. Lessmore, Bonded with the Nursing Guild of Britain_

_Severus Snape, Student, Hogwarts School of Wizardry_

"Could you have written better?" she challenges me.

"Perhaps less kindly, but no, it will do."

She gives me a chance to read a few before we send them, but it's not as interesting to me as our work. After a good portion of the school's common owls are dispatched, often with two or three letters directed in the same vicinity, we turn our attention to the small number of new envelopes that arrived in the little basket we've set on the stone windowsill for that purpose. They are more in the same vein, but from farther away, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, some minor Greek islands. The ones in other languages will take me some time to decipher, I'm thinking, when a whoop, a definite whoop, comes our of the dignified nurse's mouth.

"Oh, oh," her face is turning an odd color and it takes her a moment to compose herself before she snatches a parchment and begins to write a personal response.

"What is it? Let me see," I reach for the letter, but it is the set of wizard photographs I that catches my eye.

They appear to be identical, though one is marked "Before" in an execrable script, and the other reads "After."

A small man of about sixty with a turtle-like head poised on a thin body stares straight at the camera with the intractable look of someone who doesn't even consider he won't get his way. Such is his rigidity that only the movements of a few scientific instruments behind him betray that it is a magic, moving, photograph.

That and the slight sway of his—

My eyes can't stop traveling from one photo the other, scrutinizing the academic's nakedness, when Madam Lessmore begins to read:

"_Our dear Professor Ipswitch, We are very interested to hear about your charm which, so you claim, can cloak a magical signature. But since we specified that our methods, while still held in complete secrecy, do not involve a photographable entity or the patient's physicality per se, we did not hope to be so fortunate as to see ALL of your considerable charms._

We laugh so hard and so long we have to take a tonic.

I have to hand it to the always-resourceful Madam Lessmore: if she hadn't published the ideas I wanted to spend a lifetime studying before releasing, I would never have been exposed to some of the brightest minds in the wizarding world who could help me make that study happen. Within no time at all we've established a more or less regular correspondence with some of these acid-tongued bastards who are nevertheless making my theories expand by leaps and bounds by virtue of their hidden suggestions.

Two of my favorites are Bugstein and Bonestein, women not yet old, partners in scientific work (and other matters, I grew to think) whose arabesques of mockery reminded me a little of Cousin Veronica's, except these two harpies didn't care about my parentage. None of the academics probably cared about the ancestry of their latest target. Thus I could simply appreciate their democratic bile they spread to Lessmore and me equally in their first memorable missive:

"_Ah yes, children, so you have come to have dreams of turning lead into gold and discovering the Philosopher's Stone so you can wreak havoc on the world that can so little afford yet another pair of fools to loot it for their pleasure. It happens every few years, these alchemical dreams, and all they prove is the old adage, 'Like seeks like,' which is indeed the true utterance of the great Paracelsus, and not the more sanguine 'like cures like,' as goes the rumor, which he may well have spread himself, the rogue!_

_Your vanity and your presumption are the only things great about you—not even your bathetic claims to be part of what you surely think of as the 'one true' Paracelsan tradition distinguish you in any way from the puling masses desperate to stand out, even if it is only for their sheer audacity._

_How are we so sure that you are charlatans of the worst kind? How do we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you wouldn't be able to distinguish dealbation from rubification if your lives depended upon it? Because we happen to be in the possession of the mummified head of the Great Medick, and on rare occasions it, he, chooses to speak._

_He spoke to us after we read aloud your risible foray into study far beyond your station, and remarked, well, he nothing so much as laughed at it. He was surprised,_ _furthermore, that the Invisible School, from which you have apparently misappropriated some of your ideas, is still going._

_The Head laughed for quite a long time, and we must commend you for bringing so much delight to the desiccated remains of the father of Western science. It, he, was so delighted that we should like nothing better than to stretch those leathery features into a grimace of delectation over certain forms of tomfoolery, with which he was much acquainted in his lifetime, that have not yet gone out of fashion._

_Intransigently,_

_Professors Laura Bugstein and Dora Bonestein, Clandestine University of Tel Aviv."_

"They can't be serious."

"You grew up with the Paracelsan method as something you do, which means it holds no real romance for you," Lessmore reminds me. "For everyone else, Paracelsus and alchemy are the precursors of much of our present-day knowledge, but the link has been lost, and many thinking people have felt this severed thread to be an acute loss. Witches and wizards have been trying to make sense of the myths and contradictory traditions for centuries, and while our society has alchemical terms and techniques distributed within our magic, Muggle society sees in it only a path not taken. Probably the two illustrious professors have so seen many treatises claiming to speak with an authority about humors they can hardly believe our papers rise above mere delusion."

"Yes, yes," I'm nodding impatiently. "That much I gather. The head, the head, Madam. Do they really possess anyone's shrunken head, much less the Great Philosopher's? And converse with it?"

She shrugs, not interested in the grisly detail. "It was a common practice at one time to preserve whatever bits you could get your hands on when a Christian saint died. But perhaps they were merely trying to test how credulous you are. It's no more preposterous than the rumor he faked his own death and is actually wandering around, immortal, somewhere in Asia."

Shivering with delicious horror, I compose this letter myself.

_My dear scholars and most revered remnant of the Great Physick with whose learning I have been regaled since childhood,_

_Thank you so much for your concern about our unremarkable showing among other misguided seekers after alchemical truths. We especially appreciate your clarification that it is "like seeks like," which is much more in line with our investigations in treating common maladies with magical compounds, in which we have sometimes seen that the therapeutic picture is a little more complicated."_

Here I relate the story of the little boy and Belvedere the spider.

"_Perhaps the illustrious Head would clarify still further—how can we distinguish between a magic or a condition being attracted to a compound because they are similar, and an attraction based upon the first party needing the second in some way?_

I give a brief summary of the Red compound that so helped the Blue Lilly.

Between the illness or antigen itself, and the cure?

Here I tell them about the difference between the Gorgon Lion's venom and its own nature.

_These are thorny problems indeed and of first importance in applying the Paracelsan method to our magical patients, as two magnanimous souls such as yourselves must have contemplated many times with the clarity of heart that the recluse and the social misfit ironically tend to exhibit._

_Agog with impatience until your reply,_

_Severus Snape under the tutelage of the formidable Madam Aramis Lessmore, Bonded with the Nursing Guild of Britain."_

"I do believe you've gotten the hang of it," Madam chuckles. "Yes, their reply is by far the most on point of all the others. Maybe they do have the real head. It recognized some of your mother's ideas as coming from the Invisible School."

Over our short correspondence with these two—two and some fraction—lunatics I could never tell who exactly had said what. Was it the Head that suggested I take another look at mercury, sulfur and the other elements so often mentioned by Paracelsus and his contemporaries. I'd never been able to pay much attention to these and some of the other obscure classification methods like earth, air, water and fire, and the planets in addition to sol and luna, because in terms of potions, active/passive, hot/cold were the things that made a potion "go"—in addition to the magical color, of course.

That there was more to a human than to a Pseudosnake Beetle, was painfully clear to me the one time that Nurse Lessmore had to neutralize the effects of my salve upon a patient. My two big successes of the summer—if you can call a man losing his hand and a boy losing his best friend and pet spider unqualified successes—stand out most clearly in my mind, but every day was filled with frustration and a sense that I was only helping to a fraction of my potential. Some consultations I did nothing but stand there and listen for some command coming from the patient's magic that never came. Other times I streaked their foreheads with half a dozen compounds until Lessmore shot me a look telling me to let it be.

A few times, especially in the case of fevers, my treatment made things fractionally worse but nurses have very good magic against most fevers, so there was no harm done.

The worst time happened right before we were inundated with owls. I'd sensed the many loopholes and guesses in my theories from the start and habitually spent many nighttime hours making my crystal aviary of stolen magic fly towards or against a test compound lowered in a phial into their midst. It was impossible to tell why the Yellow Active Warms and the Blue Active Cools had a notable attraction to salts cut with copper, and yet seldom coincided on anything else. Every compound from my collection, as well as every raw ingredient I could find, was cycled through the collection of magics. Every nonsensical reaction was noted down in great detail, and then, disheartened that there seemed to be no pattern at all, I would go through the series again, hoping that at least the nonsense was replicable.

Treating patients—none of whom I knew as well as Lilly or of whom I possessed a shard of their magic in myself like the samples—was like trying to translate a wordless murmur into a safe and effective treatment on the spot. A galvanizing sort of fear that could usually be counted upon to stretch my sensitivity beyond known limits.

Or to delusion. I'm still convinced that I "heard" something coming from the teenage girl who must have been about my own age. She was an au pair just arrived from France, and so perhaps that was it—Lessmore's French was basic but my far better grasp of the language had me distracted with the task of translating.

"Will the mademoiselle tell us what she ate on the last day she was able to eat?" I ask politely, using my developing sense of how the patient would prefer to be addressed. Her eyes are huge in a gaunt face.

"It was a week ago. Potatoes, carrots, beef. Honeyloaf custard for dessert. The food is plain but good."

I translate while Lessmore nods impatiently. "Ask her how they treat her."

We get the picture of a girl who enjoys the two little children in her care, has some schooling in charms from an institute in France, and has enjoyed her two months in Britain until last week.

The information comes to us between heaves. Lessmore uses her magic to relax some of the muscles in the girl's gastrointestinal tract to ease her urge to vomit. The patient sinks back against the pillow. I dab at her lips with a wet cloth. Her eyes half-close and when I see the whites something in me springs into action.

"She is a bright blue, passive, hot," I say over my shoulder to the nurse, who is reversing her muscle relaxation spell in case she targeted the wrong muscle by mistake.

"And her illness?" Lessmore's voice is grim.

"An allergy of some kind to something in the English countryside, but that leaves thousands of possibilities. It's hard to tell what the original cause can be from the symptoms that are just a generalized immune reaction."

It turned out to be the honey. Or rather, the bees that made the honey were a magical species unique to the area and had a special mold on their legs that was taking hold in her system after having the honey for pudding. A convoluted chain of events that we might not have found out if I didn't almost kill her.

The pelican is ready with the healing steam. Jeweled Gentian Flower, powdered beetles and wormskins, along with a mild copper salt that reacted when I brought the phial to her bedside. In short, things that I'd used many times before, in that combination even, to no ill effect.

She took a deep, appreciative breath and her heart stopped beating.

"Get it away! Turn it off!" the nurse is bellowing at me, and I pour one of my neutralizing agents on the glass before smashing it in fright.

"Restarting a heart is nothing," my friend said over and over to me that night. "Wizards' hearts stop all the time in the middle of spells. It was—"

"If you say 'nothing' one more time I shall scream."

"You correctly identified the mold she started coughing up. I would have had to take a sample to a specialist. It might have been too late," she tries to appease me.

"Because I have spent all of my summers except this one collecting insects," I bite off, staring balefully at the magics going around and around in the prison I made for them. Introducing a sample of the same preparation into my little menagerie produced no notable reaction at all, not even from the two blue passive warms. What kind of an idiot tries to base actual treatment on such a few samples? "For the girl's sake it would have been better if I'd done the same this summer."

"She's on the mend now; it might have been a day or two had you not been with me," the nurse says quietly. "Severus, I thought we agreed: you are my intern, I take responsibility for you. If I let you do a little more than the average intern, it's only because I've observed you for years taking your potions science as seriously as any professional. I let you treat me! Do you think I swallow any potion or inhale any vapor just because someone tells me it's for my own good?"

This is true. Lessmore has a bit of a mania about getting sick from foreign substances. She has a few spells she says in her secret language over food and drink purchased in restaurants.

Madam strokes my hair and I sob. "I saw my mother, I saw the magic at her mouth, just like for Mum before it flew out and she collapsed in on herself," and I cry for a long time for the mother who never lived long enough to see me trying desperately, stupidly, to use my strange gifts for something good.

"I've had patients die on me before while treating their textbook ailment with the textbook cure. I've caused chemical burns with the most common lotions for rashes. We can't know everything," Lessmore's voice comes from above where my head is resting on the table. "But you can't stop, Severus, you know this." The breathy laugh coming from my mouth disturbs me as much as her words. "Let me tell you a story.

"When you asked me about my family earlier in the summer, I didn't tell you about my sister." I look up. "Yes, I have a sister. JoJo, for Josefina. She is two years younger than me, so she was eight and I was ten when we lost our mother, and one year later I left for Hogwarts."

Madam waits for me to grasp the import of her words. "Her parents were gone and you left her soon after."

She nods. "She never really got my aunt the way I did—I discovered that she was just taciturn, she was salt of the earth and you couldn't pay her to crack a smile. She never did anything but order around her own children like an army. JoJo went to Cape Verde to live with my grandparents, and the environment suited her much better."

"Do you see her?"

"Yes, I do now. I see her once a year on my trip to the island. Here is a picture of us,"

It's a muggle picture but the woman standing next to a younger Lessmore practically leaps off the page with the strength of her presence. Her skin is the color of dark wheat and her hair is long and full with a loose curl.

"_Formidable,"_ I say in French.

Lessmore laughs. "That she is. JoJo inherited my mother's gift for organization and is one of the wealthiest women on the island." Her face looks suddenly older. "But we didn't speak for almost 15 years after I left her.

"Imagine you're a child of 9. Your sister leaves you all alone to go to some school no one has ever heard of, and where you can't join her, can't even visit because none of the adults you know want to go anywhere near it. She held it against me so that she didn't even come to my Bonding Ceremony when I became a nurse."

This last hurt is the one that comes through in her voice, and the nurse pauses a moment before continuing.

"It wasn't until a few years later that I heard about a genealogist who could trace any magical ancestors for you. Since I lost my parents so young, I had no one to ask—my Aunt Penny was positively phobic about anything having to do with Hogwarts, so she was never any help. And you can't blame me for wondering if I was the first in my family or not. I paid this rather seedy little man to look into it for me, thinking that Cape Verde had to be one of the most out of the way places on earth and thus a difficult place to fake information for.

"The report he sent me was completely accurate as far back as living memory could go, and it went much farther. Each of my parents had a female ancestor who was a witch, making me one sixty-fourth magical blood. When I sent the report to my grandmother to confirm that her side of the family had been depicted correctly, my sister saw it and called me for the first time. Something about seeing it in our bloodline made her finally understand that it wasn't something selfish I got in my head one day as an excuse to leave her.

"When I say I'd give anything to have those 15 years of my life with her in it, I mean, anything but my magic. "

The nurse has my full attention and she looks at me with a pain she seldom reveals with me.

"I'm not good with people, Severus. Can you think of anyone at the school, other than you, that I exchange more than the absolute minimum of social niceties with?"

I shake my head.

"But I've made a good life for myself as a nurse. A full, contented life, because I followed my Gift. It's not been a sacrifice at all, because there really wasn't another way for me. As much as I would have loved to have stayed by my sister's side when we were young, there was something even more important than her well-being calling me, I'm ashamed to say."

She takes a deep breath.

"I didn't want to tell you about my sister at the beginning of the summer because I didn't want to push you in any direction. But you can't deny the abilities you've displayed these months, Severus. You could have spent the time taking notes for some theoretical treatise, and I would have been satisfied at giving you a chance to observe work in the field. But you rolled up your sleeves and got involved; you made me proud in front of my, er, colleague." We chuckle at the expense of Dr. Panderous, "And you even did some good, whether you'll admit it or not."

She leans forward, closer than usual. "Severous, this could be your life, in one of the healing professions—the guild of your choice, once they get over their prejudices and see what I've seen. It can be a good life for you, if you want it. And yes, we've all left something behind when we decided to follow our destiny, but very often at some point you look back and see that it wasn't as close a choice as you thought it was at the time."

Madam Lessmore falls silent and hunches back in her chair as if embarrassed.

"My dear friend, working and experimenting by your side is one of the greatest pleasures I have known," I say honestly, but at the same time crushing the memories of all the pleasures forbidden me. "I fear that nothing in my life will ever be easy—what school would accept an Alkahest, after all?"

The nurse winces at the term, as she always does. If it's a slur, I haven't heard it said often enough to have developed an immune response to it.

"So I don't know if I will ever be bonded to practice anywhere, but that doesn't mean that our work can't continue as we have been."

And then we return to discussing our latest paper, which is much more comfortable for us than a heart to heart.

My notes from that time period amazed me for years afterwards and could fuel dozens of future theses.

Here is a partial list of the papers Lessmore and I published in magical journals around the world:

_Person vs. Poison: Observed Patterns of Potion Response that Cluster Around the Disease's Properties_

_Psychoneutical Aspects of the Immune Reaction_

_Novel Uses of Common Medicinal Herbs_

_The Undiscovered Variables: Suggested Areas of Further Investigation in the Mapping of the Magical Signature_

_Handedness of Patient and Practitioner: Treatment Differentials in the Field_

_The Darkest of Arts: Clinical Portraits of Cloaked Illnesses and Curses_

_The Second Birth: Theories about the Onset of Puberty and Individuation_

_The Use of Metals in Medicaments: Suggestions and Cautions_

_Choosing and Mixing Healing Vapors_

_A Handbook for the Correct Configuration of Wand-Hand Salve Diagrams_

_Potions Pedagogy in the Authentic Paracelsan Tradition_

_Methods for the Untrained to Acquire Discernment of the Magical Properties_

_Least Harmful Methods of Treating Nightmares_

_Healing Trauma through Practice: Exercises for the Ill-at-Ease._

_And several I wouldn't have dared to publish under my name, but which I sent to some specialized journals I was too terrified to purchase to see if they ever appeared:_

_Sexual Orientation: Suggested Therapeutic Supports for the Questioning Wizard or Witch_

_Healing Trauma II: The Unspoken Wound_

_Beyond Bigham: Paraphilias and Sexual Mosaicism in an Enlightened Age._


	22. Chapter 22

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 22: The University of Ozd

_They so clothed and concealed the truth in allegorical language that even now only very few are able to understand their instruction and turn it to practical account. For this practice they had a very good reason … they did not wish the pearls to be cast before swine. For they knew that if it were made known to the wicked world, men would greedily desire nothing but this one thing, neglect all labour, and give themselves up to a dissolute and degraded life._

_-Sophic Hydrolith, Water Stone of the Wise_

_Anonymous, Frankfort 1878_

By the end of the summer I was beginning to try and integrate the theory with practice. Lessmore and I had concocted a scheme wherein each student's ailments were to be catalogued, as well as their response to any ailment or injury. I would do my best to categorize their magics insofar as the wards in the school allowed me to. And perhaps a few subtle variations in the standard compounds used at the school would produce a statistically relevant result.

Dumbledore comes down to see me shortly before school starts to talk about my future plans.

"You have done well here," the great wizard says, shaking his head at the mosaic of magic trapped behind the clear walls I made especially strong with him in mind. No sense in risking the sly old man intuiting that they are a bit too true to life. "Perhaps one day you will be able to explain what you're doing in a way I can understand."

My hand rubs against my cheek, and I start at the unfamiliar feeling of well-populated stubble. I can grow a beard after two weeks? When did that happen? Lessmore gave me my last two weeks off to dedicate towards a synthesis of our summer's work while she traveled to Cape Verde.

"It's Spagyrics just like with potions, but applied to people with the intent of developing personalized medicine and potions, perhaps psychoneutics some day as well," I explain with some pride. "What makes our magic different and the same. How to be well within that determinism."

"I couldn't have wished a better path for you," Dumbledore says with uncharacteristic candor. "Madam Lessmore is very proud of you. And I understand that together you've made a bit of a splash in the academic pond."

"Yes, these scholars have their own ways," I laugh easily now about our correspondence. It takes less than a breath to repress the guilt I feel about where this knowledge came from. "Is Lessmore back tomorrow? I find I can't think as well without being able to discuss my ideas with her." As always, the headmaster's beatific smile as if he himself planned my summer camaraderie with the nurse angers me, but I control myself. "About my schooling, sir, have you heard from Krakow or Copenhagen?"

"It's not out of the question," he replies, settling into a chair. Dumbledore's been less reticent with me the few times he's stopped by the castle this summer, and I assume it's due to the fact that I am becoming less and less like a student. The man's ability to pull strings is undisputed, and thus Lessmore brought him in to our discussions about my future studies with my consent. "The great magical institutions are eager to hear about your work and would like to correspond with you, but they are understandably nervous. I thought perhaps this year in addition to your independent study you might try your hand at teaching, Severus."

"Teaching? I want to be a university student and then continue my research. I don't want to teach."

"Think of it as a way to show how well you get along with people," Dumbledore twinkles. "It might go a long way towards impressing universities with your maturity."

"Very well." Mentally I am subtracting several hours a week from my investigations. "Maybe if your first years learn potions in the Paracelsan method they won't do everything the wrong way 'round from then on."

The old man laughs and gets up from his chair. His face is clear. He is proud of me. He can't believe that I'm only turning seventeen in October.

The truth of where I am going that night is but a tiny puff of air that wouldn't move a blade of grass.

There is a gathering at the evil magician's. I know this because Lucius has owled me and told me so. He contacted me a few times over the summer with notes that were an odd mixture of snobbery and slavishness. He really wants to see me but would sooner die than say for what. The result is like a calling card such as my grandmother would have left somewhere, but laden with subtext:

_Snape,_

_I trust this missive finds you well this end-of-summer. Better than it finds me, who have discovered I require your assistance for our common pursuits. I'm sure you were busy with your studies these months, as was I—father had me tutored in certain Obscure Arts you will find most interesting. But I do hope I see you tonight at the place you know well and have you in the place you know even better._

And I can just make out where he's rubbed out several closings:

_Fondly,_

_Yours,_

_Your friend,_

_Always,_

_L.R.H.T.T.P.S.C.C.E.F. Malfoy_

After a long summer of blank explosions into the earth, I feel like I deserve a little human contact, so I go.

The postman-looking magician raises his eyebrows at my presence but otherwise does nothing to underline my absence over these months. Perhaps he thinks I had a holiday somewhere. He's not really interested. He isn't surprised that I'm back.

My couplings (and triplings, etc.) are no longer a source of the remotest interest at these meetings. I merely retire to a corner of the sumptuous carpet with that night's collaborator, and a few people wait their turn nearby. What everyone else does I couldn't tell you and I've never troubled to find out. They're talking about something, I suppose. Maybe they all just drink excellent champagne and feign that they listen to the madman.

The only thought I let into my head is a cataloguing of the other person's magic and the way it interacts with mine. It is my intent to not access their thoughts. I don't want to know their deepest secrets nor do I want them held against either of us should the evil magician find out about that possibility. But my curiosity about magical signatures has multiplied over these months of constant inquiry, and the new samples I sense all around me carry the intoxicating possibility of advancing my research even farther.

Equipped with a condom, I press a thin, reedy man with light brown hair and a goatee back into the carpet. "It's for the good of the wizarding world," I think at him as I relax his tense thighs and prepare him for his magic-letting which will pave the way for more exact medicine the way bloodletting did centuries ago.

I imagine this man's magic, which is an unusual purple color, fitting into the glittering mosaic living in my laboratory and unlocking the puzzle of wizarding madness or how to strengthen the immune response or even to my own disorder. I want to know, I want to KNOW, and this is new, new, new, new…

My mind is so focused on the research that I am scarcely aware that it has been over two months since my last dip into someone's deliciously different magic. My weekly release in the dirt in the middle of the forest doesn't compare to this.

The man is whimpering and cooing gratefully in my arms, trying to kiss me, ecstatic to hold me —whoever I am to him—again. This vicarious love has weight and texture. Taken by surprise by his attention, I open myself to him a little more than usual. There is no parlor. I don't feel his arms around me. I feel nothing because everything is purple.

The woman he loved is blazing in his mind with all the clarity of loss. She is dark-skinned, perhaps Ethiopian, and she, I, am smiling at him anew. His magic and his memory are so beautiful I think my heart will stop.

_Tell me to stay and I will stay, oh, Sorayah, at your word I will turn my back on England, cold and middling land, forever!_

(This has never happened before—hearing someone's thoughts so clearly. I can see what he's seeing, this breathtaking woman he's kissing, yet I'm also the woman and myself as well, all at the same time).

_This is my home. I came to love it through you, and you through it. I never thought that dust could be beautiful, but in this place it is the only currency. It gets in everything, just like you have gotten inside my thoughts and my body. Oh Sorayah! The dust on the streets turns gold at a certain hour, and by the lamplight you gleam golden in my hands._

_I never knew what night was until I came here and felt the stars in my throat on clear midnights. I never knew what sun was until it turned my blood thick and sweet like the mint tea you serve me—so seriously! The same way you served me food with your hands the first time we ate together. I ate myself sick and didn't taste it at all, just for the privilege of tasting your fingertips._

_Sorayah! Sorayah!_

_You are in my arms and I won't let you go this time. No matter what excuse you give me, your parents, my parents, it doesn't matter. I leave everything behind right now. I am no longer English. From now on I will say—_

Here he says something in a dialect I don't recognize, and the woman smiles indulgently at his pronunciation with my lips. This is very confusing, but another part of my mind is thick in his magic, listening to it speak to me, the only person who can understand it-

_Tell me you want me to go and I will go, but you can't. There are no lies between us. Sorayah! Oh my—_

Some people haul me off him. I look down and the man is dead. Caving in from the inside.

"Your second victim," the evil magician says. "How do you feel?"

And I hate, hate, hate myself for my first thought being that all my potions will have to be recalibrated again because of the Reaper's Reward.

"I thought so," the man says. Though I don't feel him in my mind he seems to know what I'm thinking sometimes.

The used condom is still in my hand and with a shudder I disappear it with my wand.

Not one creature at school, large or small, could care less about the life I took.

I only care late at night when I wrestle with the impulse to ask Lucius who he was, whether he had a wife or family. Whether they buried what was left of him with his wand, as is proper for a wizard. As they did with my mother.

Not even when I killed her did I disappoint my mother as much as I did with the second death.

Lessmore, Dumbledore, the few staff members I cared about, were easily made to focus on all the advances in my research as my final school year got underway. On my not-as-terrible-as-expected rapport with the first- and second-year potions students in my care.

The daytime field trips to collect Willow-bee eggs and nighttime trips to observe the reclusive nocturnal wandering Animate Lichen had to be supervised by a faculty member, of course, but Professor Isle is only too glad to do so. We're developing an easy joking rapport that amazes the young students and I vaguely wondered if we could have become friends, if everything in my life weren't utterly wrong.

Everything I do is infused with that sandy-haired man's sacrifice and I pour every ounce of it I can into my work. I know better than to count on a university willing to take me on, and believe it would probably be unwise to break in a new school after melding so well with Hogwarts. So I make the laboratory my home for the foreseeable future, going only to my private room to change clothes. I don't have to sleep for weeks because of the huge influx of magic, and the house-elves ghost through with tea and sandwiches at regular intervals.

Lessmore comes to me now instead of me finding her in the infirmary, and we carry on conversations that might as well have been in our own language. Only a handful of people in the world could follow where our science is taking us. This woman who I wanted to know more deeply and finally achieved my aim this summer, it pains me to hide so much of myself behind our easy rapport. It would kill her to find out that the small purple dot on our matrix was all that was left of a man I think of as Stanley.

None of the students in my year probably give a second thought to where I am or what I am doing. If they notice that I'm now leading around first- and second-years, no one questions it.

Except Lucius. He manages to find me alone in the halls no matter how I try to avoid his easily recognizable magical fingerprint.

I think he's falling in love with me. Or need, or whatever sweetish, base kind of rutting it is he pleads for with those startlingly cold eyes.

If I ever decide to perform a psychoneutic vivisection on someone to test one of my experimental psychological remedies, Malfoy is the first chap I'm going to volunteer. Was he dropped on his head as an infant? I'm used to people looking at me and not seeing me, seeing only what they want in whatever my True Form is that I've never actually seen. But Lucius has started looking at me with something that is more personal even if it is still mistaken. He is deeply aroused by the fact that I killed a man with my penis (or so he thinks) and can't wait for the chance to ride on death again.

"I'm busy, Lucius," I say, trying to walk past him.

"We can go to that muggle inn," he volunteers at some cost to his pride.

"No, I have a ton of work on," I repeat, trying to soften the revulsion that the idea of sex causes now.

"Let me know when you change your mind," he says, looking through my plans and intellectual projects to some place in me that he is confident he can force his way into.

Even this stage of my life could have gone on forever more or less comfortably. The guilt at having consumed a man was easily balanced out by all of that additional power channeled into my healing mission. I went back to rutting in the mud outside of school bounds, burying the seed deeper now. I try to mark the places so that I can go back and see if the soil is caving in on itself, but the green earth looks back at me unmoved wherever I walk.

A new stasis is achieved, I say, until representatives from the University of Ozd in Hungary decide to pay a visit and learn about my research.

"Don't cluck at me," I say irritably to Madam Lessmore. Without touching me she manages to point out my crooked tie and fix the frayed cuff on my trousers. She even makes me, under pain of a haircut, sit still long enough so she can brush and plait my hair so that it lies coiled at my neck in a dozen whorls. "They haven't come to date me, they've come to talk about our work."

Flushing a little at the idea that she will be talking to some of the world's greatest investigators in the field of magical science, my friend pats her own hair and then twists a ring on her finger. "Could we practice with this again?"

She will be using a Rosetta ring, as will Dumbledore, because neither knows the difficult Magyar language. It turns out that it was the second language I learned to swear in after French, so it's easy for me to pick up again. I've been looking up technical words I wouldn't have encountered as a child in the last three weeks leading up to the visit.

The nurse is convinced that the two distinguished wizard scientists are considering giving me a scholarship to attend their noble institution, but all I'm hoping for is the beginning of a correspondence that might bear fruit one day in experiments based upon our ideas. Other than that, I refuse to exhibit myself like a trained Brackenboar cub.

"Üdvözöljük a laboratóriumunkban. Szeretne egy kis teat?" I say, and she twists the ring counterclockwise to English, so that the sense of what I just said reaches her mind with only a few seconds' delay: "Welcome to our laboratory. Would you like some tea?" Then we reverse it and I watch her mouth make the English shapes but the Hungarian sounds reach my ears.

"It will be fine," I tell her, because I know I am powerful enough to make it go fine. A movement in the magical grid hundreds of yards away tickles at my senses. "Here they come."

Where I expected two bearded potentates I see—one bearded potentate and easily the most attractive thirty-year-old man I have ever seen. Is this some kind of test? My mind protests while we bow at each other and Madam Lessmore welcomes our guests with the help of the ring. Dumbledore pours the tea and I can sense that pride again that makes me feel wretched in a place I guard with care.

I listen to them describe their own activities in Ozd, and learn little more than from their letters except that the younger man, Almos, is the youngest department head and just as focused as I. Knowing that they are observing me, perhaps to see if I will try to attack and eat the handsome man with the long wheat-colored hair and exotic cheekbones, I make myself talk at some length about what we are doing in this laboratory. They are amazed at my Magyar but I have to force them to include Madam Lessmore in the conversation. It seems they are a little inclined to ignore her, and I realize that in some corners of the wizarding world women are not seen as likely scientists.

They do pay attention to our plans, nearly finished, to Sample the entire school and try to find some way to verify what, until now, is only my word for what color, activity level, temperature, etc. each person possesses. Once we have accumulated this mountain of data we hope to compare it to the students' medical histories and, especially, treatment responses, to look for patterns. This is where a well-funded university could help—data processing.

Together, Lessmore and I rifle through some of the magical samples, saying what I have told the nurse and the headmaster—that my sensitivity is such that I can classify a person's magic after some focus and proximity. These samples were mostly gathered during mealtimes, I say, and some of it is true. I have classified people while sitting at the table with someone, but the only comprehensive diagrams are almost all people with whom I have shared a sexual experience, and thus, have a wisp of their authentic magic floating in the matrix.

"And do these people feel that you have some essence of them in these samples?" the older professor asked.

"No more than you would feel a connection to a clipping of hair or fingernail," I lie, careful to keep quiet about my connection to these samples. If anyone were to know that there is a definite link between these splinters, the ones in my system and their original owners, an unscrupulous magician could try to control the other two by taking possession of the first.

Almos' eyes travel to the locks swept back from my face. "My own hair is quite safe," I add casually. "Madam Lessmore helped me dress it herself."

My condition is now finally an explicit factor in this obscure little meeting and I wait to see what will become of it.

"Severus has been under my care since the age of ten," the nurse says and waits for the message to get to our guests. "He sleeps in this laboratory, when he sleeps at all, and I'd like nothing better than to see him placed at a school that will commit to developing his many talents."

Dumbledore looks for a moment as if his thunder has been stolen, and then beams at everyone. "Biscuit?" he asks in Hungarian without using the ring.

The older professor nods politely and makes a noncommittal sound, but the younger man says with a smile, "I should like to learn more about this classification system. You are using color, activity, temperature, and are looking at a few other qualities. How do you determine them?"

I give him my standard first-year description of magical identity and demonstrate by Divising the biscuits, teapot, spoons, sugar, and several of the laboratory implements according to different schemas.

His smile hasn't moved the whole time. "I should like to see you Divise a person, if I may," he says. "Can you tell me what color I am?"

For a moment I get a jolt of rich green so delicious I think I could marry this man in some reality. "Green," I say. "Similar to this," and I take out the children's pastel set I use to mock up some of my ideas and quickly muddle together a few shades to get the right one.

"Am I active or passive?" he says and I feel a thud against the edges of my magical awareness. He's either a habitual flirt or this is a test.

I focus my mind a little harder. Mapping someone's magic takes so much more effort without sexual contact, I think, and then blush at the Hungarian's mild gaze that seems to see into me much more easily than I into him. "I'd have to observe you for longer to be sure, but I would say active," I venture. "I say so because you have dry cuticles on your wand hand," I point. "You should use a cooling lotion to counteract the hot, drying effect of the wand on an active system." I get up to rummage in the shelves and Lessmore points me to where a potion of my own design is. Wandhand Wax.

It was a simple trick I could have done as a seven year old, but when the skin on the man's hand improves with a little of the lotion, both men are impressed. "I had never noticed there was a difference between my two hands," Almos says, and I can tell he has forgotten that he's testing me because the pressure on my shield retreats a little.

"Your hands are so different that if they were both to be cut off I'd reattach the wand hand differently," Lessmore says, and I feel a flush of pride on her behalf. "Even Severus' hands are different."

"We were wondering if our young Mr. Snape could at the very least count on your institution as a collaborator in his studies," Dumbledore intervenes, and I feel the full weight of his magic bear down to move everyone's attention away from my research partner's faux pas.

It almost works. But that Almos is damnably slippery. "'Even Mr. Snape's,'" he repeats. "There is something unusual about his hands as well?"

"Severus has some ability to do magic with his hands that I fear has atrophied since I forbade him to do it at school," the headmaster says. "It's a rare talent but one that must receive much formation to be useful."

The two men lean forward. "Show us, please," requests the older professor.

The usual glowing ball of light drawn from between my two hands impresses them more than everything I told them about Human Spagyrics. "Can you cast a spell with your left hand?" Almos asks eagerly.

"Somewhat, but it's not as powerful. The hands work together, you see. Even for you, on some level you depend upon your non-dominant hand when you cast with the wand hand."

Dumbledore shifts in his chair. "Mr. Snape is a most unusual young man, and extremely committed to study. Would you like to see some of the examples of potions his first years have made? His teaching method is straight from the Paracelsan school, to which neither I nor Madam Lessmore subscribe, but the results—"

"What is this made of?" Almos approaches the ball of light I have left hanging in the air. "Is this Lumos? We are making a study of magical optics, you see," and he pokes a finger at it.

What kind of scientist uses their finger to explore an unknown magical entity, I have no idea, but that gesture decides me that I'm not interested in going to the University of Ozd.

None of that matters the next second, because apparently the glob of light is connected enough to me that touching it makes Almos see my True Face.

I myself felt nothing, I assure you. Barely even a breath against my shield. But the Magyar is touched deeply enough to let him glimpse whatever he most wants in my face. If my life were set up for vanity I would have felt a little charge out of making this handsome, arrogant man years my senior come undone before me.

As it is, I know the whole process is more impersonal than photosynthesis.

Lessmore and I are in action before anyone else can process what is happening. She presses a cup with some potions they used on James into the young man's hands and makes him drink. I retire to a corner of the laboratory and shield myself with a small sun's worth of power. No one could break through that barrier without my wanting them to, and I never want to again.

The older magician lifts his hand at the same time that Dumbledore lifts his wand to restore some wards that must have slipped.

"Thank you for your hospitality," he says politely in thickly accented English. "Such a pity that your young scholar has this unfortunate impediment." He grasps his companion firmly by the shoulder and sweeps him out to where their portkey awaits.

"You have a home and a study here for as long as you want them," Dumbledore says to me as he refreshes the teapot for our glum trio.

I laugh without humor. "Thank you, Professor Dumbledore, sir, I am very fortunate to have friends."

At the time this feels like small consolation after seeing my university hopes dashed by the news of my irresistibility that would surely spread across Europe's wizarding schools in short order.

The truth of my statement doesn't really sink in until I have none.

"He's been asking about you," Lucius says from the door of my lab.

"How did you get down here? This is supposed to be a private wing," I say angrily. Luckily the wards keep him in the doorway.

He looks with mild interest at the matrix of colors and then back at me. "He just wants to know how you are."

I snort at the commonplace statement associated with that diabolical scheming spider of a man. "I'm sure that he's had my best interests at heart all along," I snap while shuffling papers. "Some of us have something better to do than use first years as footstools and fifth years as something else."

Lucius has a strong aversion to being classified as an Incongruent in any way, though he has more kinks than a bramble's beard, poor bugger. He takes the gibe quietly. "You don't feel him calling you?"

"I don't, but I do feel you annoying me. Please go be a Slytherin somewhere else."

The black taste is creeping up my gullet and I force it away with a swig of the potion I have been keeping on hand since the Hungarian Incident, as Dumbledore refers to it with palpable capital letters. He is trying to pass it off as an amusing anecdote, but Lessmore mourns the death of my hopes for a higher education much more deeply than I do.

Me, I haven't been able to taste food in the weeks since. No potion provides more than a few moments of minty relief. Even Dreamless Sleep won't keep the black savor out of my consciousness.

"I'm so sorry about school, Severus," Lessmore begins one day. "But you can't just stop eating."

I take an experimental swallow of a different herbal brew and grimace at how it just spreads the taste around, like every other liquid. "I told you, I can't get rid of this taste in my mouth. Liquids are nauseating and solids out of the question." It's been a month and a half since our distinguished visitors left so suddenly and I've lost weight I could scarce afford to lose. It's a comfort that I can't see how I really look. Aunt Adele's face looks more like a stone idol than ever, but I can't say whether it's any worse than normal.

"The Dreamless Sleep doesn't help?" she asks, her medical mind jumping into action. "This is—

"—Most unusual," I chime in, and we laugh mirthlessly at her catchphrase, pronounced over all the myriad of strange things that end up in her infirmary.

"We should call in a Mediwizard or –witch for a second opinion. You are going to make yourself vulnerable to Merlin-knows-what, and we don't know enough about your condition to be able to predict with certainty how to cure you if you do fall ill."

As usual, the proof that I have been discussed as a "condition" behind my back makes me annoyed. "You can only hope to have the opportunity for such a fascinating experiment," I retort and immediately want to bite my black tongue. I've been more irritable in the last few weeks than I have since my first year at Hogwarts. My reputation for a sharp tongue notwithstanding, people don't normally get to me enough to truly rankle, but I just snapped at the closest thing to family I have. "I'm sorry, Madam Lessmore, I really am out of sorts. Perhaps I should lay down."

She looks about to say something and then makes up her mind not to. "Of course, dear, I'm on duty tonight. Come up for some Whist if you can't sleep."

And I do. I do lay down and I do feel like I'm choking on blackness while I sleep. I do throw a robe on over the loose pants and tunic I tried to sleep in. I do go up to the infirmary for a game of Wizard Whist.

I just end up somewhere else entirely.

Not twenty feet away from my laboratory I fall into some kind of abyss.


	23. Chapter 23

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 23: Heaven Reversed

_But you, that are polluted with your lusts,_

_Stain'd with the guiltless blood of innocents,_

_Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices,_

_Because you want the grace that others have,_

_You judge it straight a thing impossible_

_To compass wonders but by help of devils._

_Henry VI, part 1, Act 5, Scene 4_

The luxurious carpet looms up fast and I land lightly in the last place on earth I ever wanted to be.

"Welcome, Mr. Snape," the man says. It takes a moment to reconcile his postman's face with the new chair he has acquired, a velvet seat topped by two gilt gryphon heads, each one curving its sharp beak on either side of his head. "I've been expecting you."

"Never a long bet if you go so far as to kidnap someone," I murmur. "Though doing such a thing within Hogwarts walls is indeed impressive."

"Indeed, but I cannot take the credit," he says with unusual modesty. "Our mutual friend is rightly rather proud of his handiwork."

I see Almos sitting in the corner wearing his beauty and intelligence like weapons. "The Hungarians are apparently quite advanced in their own dark practices. Perhaps a collaboration is in order."

The young Magyar's hair is gleaming on both sides of his Slavic face. There's something about the look in his eyes. He is not just there because he's obsessed with whatever he saw in me. The man sits completely still and he calls me silently. He calls me with everything he is, not so I can join with him, but because he does not take losing easily and he feels as though he lost face before me. All this occurs to me in a second but I am far more concerned about the evil postman.

"Are you blackmailing me?" I ask and he laughs in surprise.

"About Charles? I had already forgotten." I change my guilt compartment dedicated to "Stanley" accordingly. "He was a most instructive experiment, wouldn't you say? I trust you have been benefiting proportionately, or you would have returned sooner."

"I would not have returned at all, had someone not absconded with my person."

"This specimen will be a most enjoyable pastime, will he not? Another link in your research?" I stare at him. What does he know of my work?

"Almos has explained your investigations to me, and I am pleased to have been a humble patron," the man chuckles. Is it just me or do the gryphons on the chair preen and lick their beaks at my discomfort? I'd not thought of this person as being at all implicated in my research, even if I knew some of his magician followers had—sacrificed—for it.

"I've most enjoyed being part of the betterment of society," he continues. "Shouldn't we keep moving forward?"

In my mind I have already quit Hogwarts and moved to herd goats in Tibet. "I'm afraid I must correct you, sir. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a 'we.' I have a certain problem, that as you seem to be aware, cannot be satisfied under normal circumstances. While you have been very kind in offering your carpet—"

He holds up his hand and I feel my tongue snaking like a clammy black sock down my throat. Is this him that I've been feeling?

"Almos," he intones. "Claim your prize."

The Hungarian is there in a moment. His magic is very strong, stronger and sharper than almost anyone I've ever encountered, but it is shimmering an unstable bright green. He is trying desperately to shore up some crumbling part of himself that is even more urgent than his attraction for me. The mixture is dangerous and I steel myself as he runs his hands over my face. "Very pretty," he says in a way that insinuates I'm effeminate.

"Perhaps," I say, too worried about the evil magician to play games.

"You look much thinner since last I saw you. Have you been well?"

"You kidnapped me from my own hallway to inquire about my health? Next time use an owl."

His hands are running all over me and I'm desperately trying to will down my penis. "Yes, it is a trick one can do after having been in a place once. I can teach you when you come to study with us."

"That's very kind of you," I say, "But I have not decided to attend your university."

"The university is inconsequential," and the masculine jaw closes over one of my nipples through the shirt. I gasp. No one in this noisome little parlor usually touches me in this most treasured of gestures and I forget about my ban against bodily fluid exchange. "Far more important studies take place in other locations."

"It seems as though the Hungarians have their own society much like ours in England," the evil magician supplies from his perch on the gryphon chair. "It could be quite a plum placement for all of your studies."

Some critical lack of self-confidence that has made me downplay my powers all my life snaps out from under me. This is ridiculous and unhealthy and I am leaving. My shield becomes hard as a diamond and Almos stumbles backwards. "Thank you all for your interest in my future success, but I already have a laboratory. Good evening."

The man's hand has shot out and clamped on my arm before I even see it. It's boiling my skin with that black taste. I can't scream because my tongue is paralyzed with black. I'm going to lose my arm. They're going to have to cut it off. I'll never do magic again—

The man is looking at me with some discomfort of his own. He doesn't like the sensation that one jot of his power is flowing from him to me. For a second we look at each other and we are the most powerful combined magical force in the world. Apparently several earthquakes and a tsunami happen on that night, but all I can feel is the dreadful wrongness seeping into my bloodstream and changing me forever.

He lets go of my arm and examines his hand. It's melting a little bit, but my arm is in far worse shape.

It now bears the Dark Mark.

Now I can hear the man's name—Voldemort. I can hear what people are talking about in his presence—the toadies and sycophants are all plotting some cheesy revolution against the muggles.

"You must be joking," I say as Almos gets us naked and begins trying to knock me down to size with the exercise of his pleasure. "Why would a Half-blood join your little cause?"

"The question is, and it's the only question: are you, or are you not, an abomination?" Voldemort asks.

Almos murmurs something but he's making that breathy laugh so his opinion doesn't count for much.

I look at the people watching idly while they sip champagne and plan on going out to hunt muggles for sport later.

A gorgeous, arrogant man is proving something to himself by pushing me onto all fours and using me with no regard for my comfort. I feel his magic; I see it. I hear it. My mind is Divising him in dozens of ways as the new note is added to the symphony of magics sounding in my blood, but there is no longer any trace of the combined ecstasy-scientific wonder that draws me with the same power that draws Miss Bundle to her papery trysts with knowledge. The door to any purity has shut when the still-bubbling wound opened on my arm.

I'm more of an abomination than I ever thought possible.

"You see, I wanted you to join our cause of your own free will, but when the Hungarians became aware of your gifts, I didn't want to leave it up to chance," Voldemort says. What a ridiculous name for someone who would look better behind a butcher counter. "Your friend was a bit careless and didn't expect that my offer to help ensnare you might have another purpose."

"I can find my way through life without a master," I say and the Hungarian's pleasure is building to almost excruciating levels. He fancies he's humiliating me while I completely ignore his actions.

"Oh I think you'll find that you cannot any longer," Voldemort says and he makes my arm throb all over again with just a look. "Beg him for it," he commands through the pain. "I want to see you wallow."

"Please," I say, begging him to stop burning my arm. "Please."

"Please what?" he asks. I'm finally seeing what's behind the bland façade.

"I need ," I can only force the words out at the level of a whisper. "you inside." My tongue feels like it's going numb as a way of protesting what I'm forcing it to say.

"Inside what?" Voldemort says like a perverted schoolmaster.

I know the impropriety he wants me to say, but I know now that I will never be able to divide one part of me from the rest and say it is more disgusting. I am a ruin cut from one cloth and I can only say the truth. "Inside me."

Almos's hair is hanging wild in his face and brushing against my back. "Say it in Hungarian," he says in Hungarian.

And I let the liquid syllables run over my black tongue as his spiteful liquid shoots into my most private recesses that would never belong to me again.

"Let him drink," Voldemort commands with a hand, stopping my orgasm before it starts. The spent blond man opens his mouth as I feed him the full length of my member. My eyes flick over to Voldemort's and he grins broadly at my deference before he nods the go-ahead. My seed has never felt more noxious pulsing out of me, and I take some gratification in the idea that the treacherous Almos will be unable to even conjure Lumos for at least a week and may be burned in the process. And he will return without his prize pet.

Voldemort is petting my head. "Why do you not cut your hair?" he asks.

I catch myself before automatically telling about the prophesy. "It's a Laurent family tradition. One of my forefathers had hair ten meters long when he died," I say, and he's enough of a snob to accept that at face value.

_I am the poison-dripping dragon,_

_who is everywhere and can be cheaply had…._

_But if you do not have exact knowledge of me,_

_you will destroy your five senses with my fire_

_-Theatrum Chemicum_

I wander around in the forest for days in my torn pajamas, eating a few medicinal leaves when the hunger and thirst become unbearable. There are so many ways to kill myself but my will and my mind seem wiped clean. I can't decide. I sit there in the dirt, shivering, unable to pick from the many dozens of ways to end my life. The forest is crawling with ready death, and I don't know whether to eat some green Nilaberries or scrape some moss off the north side of a willow tree, or seek out one of the million species of poisonous mushrooms.

What I do manage to accomplish is rubbing of the top layer of my skin, particularly in some very sensitive areas. Using the acidic leaves of the Ineffable Yew I clean and I clean and I clean and I clean.

There will be no more lapses in my rejection of body fluid sharing. I'm going to make myself a burnt-skin monster so no one will want me.

Professor Isle finds me on one of her excursions with the Hippogriff. I had apparently passed out from hunger and exposure after four days of gleefully planning my own death.

My eyes open to Madam Lessmore's face. She is pinched and tired. "Severus," she says with no relief in her voice. "You're here."

Something less than a ringing endorsement.

"I very much didn't want to be," I murmur and the wounded look on her face hurts me into a more wakeful state. "I didn't want to be anywhere," I say as if my suicide would be less hurtful than my escape from the school that had been so good to me.

"Why?" she bursts out and then covers her mouth. She doesn't want to know. She suspects it has something to do with sex and she doesn't want to think of me as an Incongruent.

"I've done some stupid things, but I never wanted any of this," I gesture with my left arm, swaddled in bandages. How they managed to safely dress my wounds is a mystery. And my face! However did they heal my skin rubbed raw? "You know how I am when I'm focusing on something. I don't notice anything else but the problem."

"Our work," she falters, "Is it- "

"It's finished," I say as a nice way of saying, "it's tainted through and through and through with the rot of Voldemort."

The exposure and weeks of malnutrition almost give me my wish. I'm as good as dead, some days, what with a hacking cough and something going wrong with my liver. My skin bears no scars but it is painful at the creases in my elbows and a few other places I think I deserve to hurt. Nothing they give me works the way they expect for a normal person, and I simply can't be bothered to venture an opinion on the matter.

Eventually some obscure will inside of me decides to live. I emerge from the infirmary bed a wreck of a man shortly after my 17th birthday. The first thing I do is smash my laboratory until nothing is larger than a fine powder. The notes Lessmore has already locked away in preparation for this moment, apparently, so I shred the draft of a potions textbook I've been writing for first- and second-years in the Paracelsan method. The magical samples' death causes screams of sympathy in their cousin shards inside of me, but these losses are drowned out by the loss of all my hopes. When everything is swept into neat piles according to magical color, I wait for Dumbledore's step, which I can sense from far off.

He comes in without the trappings of authority. He is merely a tired man in a blue robe who has just lost a battle he thought won.

"Tell me," he says simply. And so I do. My new black tongue tells him everything brutally, including every detail of my new servile attitude towards Voldemort and the treachery of the Hungarian, stopping short only of telling him of my second kill for fear that he may ever be held as complicit in it, but he is fixated on one detail.

"You have been going out into the woods beyond school grounds to relieve your tensions?" he says wonderingly. "You were prepared to do this to respect my wishes about activity on school grounds?"

My face that is already settling into the permanent sneer of my adulthood is startled for a moment. "Of course," I say. "What else could I do? Apparently men need to ejaculate and your wards prevent that here. Even Incongruents must function as men, it seems."

"My boy, you are one of the most Congruent human beings I have ever met," Dumbledore says. "What would any of us have done with your lot in life? You do know that Bigham died in disgrace at Aurora Rest Sanatorium, don't you?"

My mouth drops open.

"He was an utter quack. Half the Incongruencies were his own, surely you guessed."

I shake my head dumbly.

"As soon as you can stop tormenting yourself with something some idiot wrote in a long-outdated book, you will be able to rebuild."

"Re what?" I laugh my new hard laugh. The older man winces. "Aren't you down here to wish me goodbye and good riddance?"

"On the contrary, I was going to make you a job offer," the old man says with a cunning look I'd never noticed before.

And so it is arranged that I will become Dumbledore's spy, and the youngest member of the faculty in the history of Hogwarts.

As I'd long ago discovered, if the Headmaster says it is to be so, it is so, and no amount of grumbling or sidelong looks make anyone form a completed protest about the matter.

My independent studies are to become a smokescreen that leads Voldemort away from any truth that exists in Human Spagyrics. At all costs he must not understand everything I am capable of—the inhuman mastery over potion science, my ability to read thoughts when I give it half an effort, the hand magic, the links to all the magicians' magic I've drunk from still alive inside of me.

Since the two younger classes are unusually large I will teach a group of the first and second year students in Potions, Charms and History of Magic. The current potion mistress, Professor Cabinet, had been thinking of retiring soon anyway (or, as I suspect is more likely, Dumbledore never had much use for her), so I will be a full-time faculty member next term. In addition, I will devote the rest of my time to either making potions for school use or examining the school magical grid with an eye to defense against Voldemort, whose activities I will give a detailed report of after every time I'm Called.

But my most important mission is to get laid safely away from school. Killing people optional.

Dumbledore forces himself to listen to what ensues when I am Called, but soon I tire of rubbing his face in it and learn to soften the truth. He thinks I am scrambling many wizards' and witches' minds with the desire for a vanished love, draining half of Britain of its magic, up to but not including death. Voldemort turns out to be like many men of power—unimaginative when it comes to his idea of his subjects. Any number of people doubt him or work against him when it suits—I've seen it in their minds when it occurs to me to look while bedding them. He just thinks of everyone as pawns and pawns don't have ideas and desires. A fatal flaw if his paranoia were not so complete.

Now that people know that seeing their heart's desire can result in their untimely demise, Voldemort uses my body as a means to exact obedience. People submit to me now as a way of proving their allegiance to him.

Me, he makes me beg; he makes me grovel. He has people introduce all manner of objects into me. It is strange he never realizes that making someone parrot some dirty phrases while you singe the skin off their arm is something paler than passion.

I learn to retreat into a place where it is just me and the magic. My great need for novel magic and the need of my companion. I learn to pity and hate humankind even as magic swirls around us like a miracle. I remember what it is like to love, that I will never love again, from the breathy laughs and shining eyes of the people making love to someone else through me. Voldemort has no idea what we we're up to while he orders our bodies together and laughs at the abandon on my victims' faces.

There is one new wrinkle. If any man comes near me without a muggle condom, or if I am made to approach a person of either gender without one myself, the vomiting tends to ruin the experience for both of us. And I am unable to perform in any capacity.

The evil magician accepts this new evidence of my weakness as a sign that I will never be a threat to him because I will always retain some level of hypocrisy about what I'm doing to people.

"What kind of frivolous monster needs to wear kid gloves while he eats people?" is the way Voldemort sums it up.

He keeps boxes on hand so I can do his work.

But my other new compromises to my position occur to me slowly over the years that I spent completely alone with my fate, watching the black magic slowly poison whatever good there was once in me, until the spiteful, pompous, cruel man I became was all that was left.

But wait! I rage to no one. That's not what happened! Where is all the anguish and the dirt of those couplings? What about the efficiency I gained at killing upon his order, but not until I'd taken my fill? What of how sick the black magic made me until they had to buy a muggle intravenous machine to feed me during the worst times? How my enviable mind and powerful magic became clouded until I could scarcely put two thoughts together? How I grew to hate my body, and all men's bodies (and women's) for the threat they were? The times I tore someone with my need to get closer, closer, to lose myself, to see if there was love hiding for me anywhere behind the thin tissue that I could borrow for my own, for a little while.

There was none of this "being alone with the magic" nonsense!

But no matter how I insist on my version of the story, I look at that section of my past and that's what I see. Damnation! Who knew that madness was so insipid! I was there. It was filthy and ignoble and many times I went without being Called.

Just to feel something for a little while, to relieve my tongue of the black taste by lapping at someone's magic. Pink! Yellow! Orange! Anything but black!

One of my unproven theories is that human beings, especially magical beings, need to be touched. When someone lives within cottony wards and under layers of guilt, fear and shame, separated from the rest by others' fear of being dissolved by your aberrant constitution—it does something to you.

Of course, there are those muggle studies with the monkeys who grow up wasted and strange if they don't have any contact with a mother, and seem to do better with a doll that has the merest suggestion of a monkey face. But I've been around people my entire life. I can't wait to get away from them, most days. It's touch, a hand on my cheek, that makes me chase shadows in my dreams.

No, I can't blame the times that I crawled to Voldemort's feet and begged him, the keeper of my fix, for the privilege to take someone on an imaginary requirement for touch. It's not a vitamin. I didn't suffer from tactile scurvy. I used people up!

Voldemort never tires of watching me feed. I am his secret weapon. His siren who can effectively emasculate the strongest magician for weeks, and leave him vulnerable to suggestion about me for months. He loves watching greed incarnate at work.

Following our ill-fated interchange, Almos was briefly imprisoned. He had accosted a tall woman with very long black hair who had the bad luck of wearing mannish trousers the day he saw her from behind in Budapest months after our encounter.

Even I don't know if the person I slap my flesh on is going to survive the experience. Voldemort alone decides how long it goes on, and whether I take everything the person has to give or only some of their magic. He orders me to devour rivals lured by the smallest touch from my irresistible skin, and has a talent for knowing when the unfortunate man or woman is quite dead, or just mostly dead.

All the former means to me is a new recalibration of my magic (I've perfected the equations with the Nonesuch salt) and days and days of scrubbing myself raw and submerging myself in what I imagine to be purifying solutions.

The only person I can stand to be around anymore vanishes during this time. Miss Bundle never judges me for a moment, because she recognizes all the signs of another person being consumed by unbridled desires and the hubris that is wanting to know the mysteries of the universe. In exchange for an unlimited supply of Liber Lactima Lotion she lets me sit in the library, my mind too empty to retain any reading material. For those moments I feel someone understands why a person would throw everything away chasing after a sensation.

Then one day she is gone. Miss Bundle never goes anywhere except the occasional meeting with her black market suppliers or the other sufferers of Morbid Bibliophilia, with whom she occasionally gets together to evoke various lost works that have supposedly resurfaced in the book underworld.

So far her comfortable situation at Hogwarts has been enough to make her resist the allure of these ventures. That, and the tasks that Dumbledore was constantly setting for the librarian: some new method of indexing the library's assets, some charm for making the paper and parchments more resistant to wear. The headmaster was probably wholly uninterested in the results of these assignments, other than as a way to channel the immense intelligence of the woman who wouldn't remember to eat if someone didn't remind her about the scheduled mealtimes.

But apparently her curiosity about the lost manuscripts of Sappho or a new work definitively proving that Sir Francis Bacon authored the writings of Shakespeare got her excited enough to leave everything behind without warning.

It's not an unexpected loss, but I miss my fellow fiend terribly.

_Where are your philosophers? Where your doctors? Where are your decocters of woods, who at least purge and relax? Is your heaven reversed? Have your stars wandered out of their course, and are they straying in another orbit, away from the line of limitation, since your eyes are smitten with blindness, as by a carbuncle…?_

_The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists_

_Paracelsus_

"Is it really worth it?" I scrawl on a slate while they hook me up to the IV machine after one ugly, gluttonous, deadly tryst, and its subsequent ritual of chemical flaying. My magic is not growing from these killings. I'm imploding on myself. No one can stand to be around me when I'm able to talk, so perhaps it's lucky that sometimes I can't. "A few bits of mostly useless information. Where's the big raid you always promise? Combine the ones they torture after a few glasses of champagne and the ones killed when I'm not there and they'd nearly fill the Great Hall. I think we need to cut our losses," I write to Dumbledore because my tongue flops uselessly in my mouth after these assignations. They assure me my tongue isn't actually black, but since I can't look in a mirror I don't believe them. "Once people become intoxicated with the possibility of union, they're willing to do anything for Voldemort. His recruits are increasing. Minus my share of illusion is a net gain for our cause."

Dumbledore gets a stubborn look. "That is not an option."

Madam Pomfrey, the new nurse, looks over suspiciously and goes back to organizing her storeroom. She can't bear the sight of me, much less getting within ten inches of me, and the feeling is entirely mutual. Madam Lessmore retired soon after I got the Mark, and everyone knew that was why.

Suddenly everyone is in my business again and I wish I cared what they thought. The idea that the castle itself is angry with me and has withdrawn its protection does wound me, however. The paving stones seem to move underneath my feet to trip me and my door has a habit of sealing up while I'm asleep. One of these days a stone is going to come loose from the ceiling and that will be the end of all this.

"She wouldn't mind being shut of me," I write, sliding my eyes to the nurse.

The old man snorts and makes the chalk write from across the bed. "Only the headmaster has the right to say 'off with his head.'"

"Really?" I wrest the chalk from him. My sickly heart is beating in my chest with something like excitement. "Beheading is in the top five of my list of ways to go." I'm not kidding. He can look where I keep it on my blotter in the laboratory where I mostly stare off into space.

"We're at war," he writes without the chalk. "No one commits suicide during wartime. It just isn't done."

He gets up and moves my thick braid from where it's been trapped behind my back. It now curls protectively around one shoulder and dangles down my chest. "I remember when you were a scabby boy of ten," he says warmly. "He had more fight in his little finger than the great hulking clod who has assumed his identity in the present day."

"Do they have Yule Meade in bags?" I slur out painfully as he turns to go. It is Christmas after all, very soon. I can't taste anything anymore, but my mind might enjoy knowing my veins are being fed with the traditional drink.

"I'll see what we can get by Madam Pomfrey," he whispers in a way that only reaches my ears.

My memory does not fail me when I say that until that morning, things were the same for a long time. And I thought I liked that. Dumbledore was my only supporter, and we became friends as I never would have thought we could. Though I didn't like the understanding between us that it was better I get my kicks on Voldemort's orders as a double agent than I expose any good, normal wizard to my affections. I fancied I caught him looking at me for signs of a relief that was our shared relief: Did you get off? was the look in his eyes. Good. Carry on with the plan. Problem filed away until another day.

What would he have done if I'd disobeyed him yet again? If I'd tried it on with someone worth saving? If I'd fallen in love, of all things?

Would he have stopped me? Would he have counseled my unfortunate would-be paramour?

Would I have fought back?

But during those many years that slipped blackly into one another, I came to value my one ally higher than any other thing on earth. Without Dumbledore's support, I was as good as dead. Someone would kill me for a monster if I didn't kill myself first.

That's why one of the worst fears out of the many that assail me like a drove of Killer Bog Gnats is the fear that Voldemort will ask me to kill Dumbledore.

At that point in my life, everyone's face blurs together: the ones I've stolen magic from live inside my shattered system. The ones I've killed. The ones I've watched be killed. I can't concentrate on the present for longer than a few minutes. So in my dreams I'm killing another under Voldemort's smiling gaze and I suddenly see the dying face is Dumbledore's! It always seems like just another face until it's too late.

The old man must think I've gone bonkers, but I always scrutinize his features very carefully when he talks to me, rehearsing his nose, his mouth, those eyes one would think stand out among all men's eyes. And before I go to sleep, one hundred repetitions of

Don't kill the bearded one with the eyes that make you feel bad.

If called to do so I'll take the poison capsule I wear in a tiny compartment in my hair-clasp.

But I was remembering...


	24. Chapter 24

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 24: A War of Attrition

I am angry on that morning, the first day of yet another term. Though I do a pantomime of anger often enough, it is rare that something touches me this deeply. And it surprises me.

The same wondering faces of the new first years are soon to appear, as always. Standing back from the crowd, I would always wonder about their fates and feel vaguely ashamed that I would become a tiny part of their life journey. Standing ankle-deep in children always made me feel abashed at my comparatively towering (fossilized) height. It always makes me feel like a tree that grows slanted over the water yet miraculously doesn't fall.

"Do you think he'll be good at Transformation?" a breathy voice comes behind me.

"I'm sure he'll be good at shielding," says Professor Flitwick farther down.

Wrenching my attention from the rather nice vision of being a tree, I stare at them. "Are you still on about this?"

"Oh, Severus, aren't you the least bit curious?" asks Professor Sprout. She says my name as if she were talking to a recalcitrant Moonlight Borage plant, And she does talk to plants. Incessantly.

"He is a boy. Just like any other boy he will shirk and then whinge when called to task; he will gorge on puddings; he will have nightmares about Mr. Filch. Why should I be curious?" I say, trying to recapture that feeling of being a tree.

"Well, Severus, you must be right," says Minerva and I feel stung by her tone. What does she mean by that?

"There he is!" a murmur goes through the staff assembled in the Astronomy tower to see the carriages approaching. How they know it's him is beyond me, but I've felt him half a mile away. The boy's magic is undeniably strong, and very different than his parents', which I feel or imagine to feel has the tiniest twinge of recognition deep inside of me.

I take a swig from the flask of a potion I habitually carry against nausea. Then they pass me a spyglass and I see a boy with shaggy hair looking exactly like any other boy of 11. I pass the glass to the next faculty member and turn away. This belief in predestination is medieval. It's unhealthy.

But it's not so easily dismissed. Everyone makes a big to-do about where he's Sorted. People elbow each other at dinner and vie for the honor of passing him the rolls. Soon I realize this boy is going to get in the way of the tranquil bankruptcy that is my lot.

"Quiet!" I roar in my first-year potions session. "Mr. Potter," I let the name hang there for a moment and he doesn't disappoint-defiance wars with terror. I like a little spirit. "Mr. Potter, perhaps you would like to tell us one of the first principles of potion-making."

It's not that hard of a question. The book is sitting right in front of him and it says "Elementary Potions; The Functional Flame." It's one of the only beginner-level texts claiming to impart the Paracelsan method, but mostly it's just the normal jumble of admonitions and simple exercises with a few quotes from the Great Physick thrown in. For instance, the inscription inside says: 'Let fire and Azoc suffice thee,' Fire alone is the whole work and the entire art. This concept is to be found in the Book of Vexations, but any wizard child of five knows that modulating the flame is the first secret of potions. Even a muggle knows you can't make tea without boiling the water.

His cheeks flame but he doesn't look down. "I don't know, sir."

He didn't even try. I don't like that. In my class you have to at least try. I might ridicule you but whatever you say will be folded into the lesson. It's part of the Paracelsan method—my own hard-knocks version of it, anyway.

"You don't even want to hazard a guess?" If he says the cauldron, we can talk about that—the recipe, the wand, the anything, just say something. He shakes his head.

I can see the room is squarely behind the boy. People are shooting me looks as if I'm a total bastard. Usually they don't start doing that until I assign homework.

"The flame, young sir, the flame is your constant in making a potion."

The little girl next to him flips through the textbook and her hand shoots up.

"The flame, literally or figuratively—there are many magical reactions between compounds that will do the work of a fire." She's going to be tiresome, I note.

He nods and makes no move to hide his upset. Someone pats him on the back. I feel like things are getting away from me already. Is this boy so used to getting everything handed to him that he won't even take a risk?

Someone has already knocked over her empty cauldron and it's rolling down the aisle. For the rest of the class I give the speech I've give a hundred times with the full knowledge that no one is listening and the first chance they get they will stir counterclockwise when using a Warming reagent, and the next thing you know their pigtail will be caught in the sticky goo that leaps out of the cauldron, and when it gets cut off somehow it will all be the fault of that bastard, Professor Snape.

When I dismiss the class, I look up from my papers. He's hung back and he's looking at me. I sneer at him, but it bothers me a little. He's not angry that I can tell, not afraid. He's measuring me up. This eleven year old who doesn't grasp the mechanics of making tea—who must have always had his tea made for him—is sizing me up. It would be ridiculous if it weren't strange. I don't like people looking at me. They can look at Professor Snape that arrogant sod, but don't look at me.

Don't look at me with eyes that shade of green, have mercy.

"Would that you had made this show of curiosity when asked about the subject matter," I say. "I had already despaired of your interest. Five points from Gryffindor."

"Yes sir," he says and he turns away.

Don't act like you know me. You don't know me, child! I rage at his back.

It becomes a part of my routine, this new uncomfortable feeling of being caught at some disappointing act in the eyes of an eleven-year-old. I'd do anything to escape him looking at me but of course I'm not going to avoid the gaze of a mere child. Minerva, his head of house, especially, thinks I'm being childish by overcompensating with the glares and the stony looks.

But clearly the child is lazy. He doesn't try. He's completely disinterested in what he must think is a science beneath him. Impress the girls with his derring-do on the quidditch field, play at smiting the other boys with a wand he holds like a toothbrush, transfigure himself into a cat and get stuck, anything but a solid hour of effort with the potions master, who smells like Botulbane and belongs in the scullery with the house elves.

All that I ask is the slightest bit of attention, even if it's out of fear or the desire to show off or to earn marks for your house. This complete disregard makes me furious!

The images start moving faster in my dead memory. No wonder I was bored. What I see from the safety of death is truly all the same. My sneers, their childish pranks and eye-rolling, and over those next several years there is added a new note: the same annoying thing about this boy. What is it? I feel another painful revelation coming on.

"Da'. Come play."

I'm very young. Two? Three? I'm playing quietly at my father's feet. Maybe he is reading a newspaper. I'm building a tower out of some old books and a few dented tin dishes that are no good for magic. It's something any boy would do.

"Da'. Play blocks with me."

I look at him. He turns a page. Doesn't he want to play?

"Da', look at what I made." And I start telling a story about the teetering little castle I'm making.

Finally he says, "Jenny?"

My mother wanders in and begins playing blocks with me.

My father couldn't understand a single word I said!

It was all in French, and even then most people wouldn't have understood everything because my mother always snuck in a little bit of Breton, though who knows when she was ever in Brittany.

This missing piece in my relationship with my father becomes clear for the first time. My mother and I spoke in French while she still spoke, perhaps because that's the language she thought in. And then after that Adele hopelessly scrambled my brains and who knows what came out of my mouth. The bitch!

It seems so trivial compared to the fact that I killed my mother, but when I look back on my childhood I mostly see the same consistent rejection from the man who sat across the dinner table from me. The only war that my father could consistently wage upon me was the complete withdrawal of his attention. It made me so angry watching him read something while he ate our plain food!

But then I did the same thing right back to him. My father didn't exist in the bubble my mother and I have created for ourselves with our minds and our potions. No wonder my father and I exploded in violence occasionally. It's hard to ignore someone indefinitely; each person requires the slightest bit of recognition from the people around him, and they'll get it at any cost.

Harry Potter was treating me the same way my father did: to the constant chafe of a war of attrition. His eyes, which were the color of my nostalgia, held me like a specimen between tweezers, each time our paths crossed, and then I vanished for him completely between meetings.

I'm not that kind of a bastard! I want to yell at all those years under Harry's wide eyes. Because I asked you a question and you didn't know the answer you file me under sadistic git? Until you know what KIND of bastard I am, don't file me under the wrong sort—it feels terrible!

"He reminds me of another boy," Dumbledore is at my doorway while I'm furiously cleaning up a spilled potion courtesy of Mr. Potter et al.

"Don't even," I spit without looking up. "James wasn't a bit awkward."

"Physically, I'll grant you, he looks like James, but his life has been much more like another little boy's."

"If you want me to go to a Psychoneutic practioner I will, but until you command me to seek competent psychological help, please refrain from offering your untutored opinion," I grouse, levitating the mess into a rubbish bin.

"I can still see you in there, Severus, and you're in no small amount of pain," the headmaster intones with that hideously placid air of his. "Just promise me you'll think on it."

Of course then I can do nothing but think on it! After the identical day there never fails to be a long night left to contemplate my fate. Harry Potter's delicate sensibilities are added to the rotation of self-recrimination. Laying my head to the pillow is like pulling the hammer in Russian roulette, except I know full well something unpleasant is bound to explode into my sleeping brain. The only question is what.

All my nightmares tell me is that he dislikes me so intensely that he actually has some primitive idea of how dangerous I am. Good for him—following instincts like that just may keep him alive.

Let me anticipate your objection.

By which I mean my objection. The other me. The one that thinks I am still a creature for whom love is relevant.

This nagging feeling has nothing to do with the fact that Harry is the child of James and Lilly.

You think I am out of touch, but I say again, it has nothing to do with the two people I loved—thoroughly and deeply, I assure you—half a lifetime ago, when I was sixteen. Though some orange fish and blue fish survive in the now-crowded ocean of my magic, it is polluted, murky, I can't see my own hand in front of my face within that mess.

There's nothing that I would like better than to say that Harry Potter causes an echo of recognition within me because of his beloved parents. It would mean I was still human.

Alas.

I wish I could say that this boy with the insolent eyes felt like some kind of kin to me.

Again, no.

But avalanches of dark magic and sordid, ugly sex have occurred since then, and all I can see is the vague outline of a young boy through a thick haze.

I may be the only person that sees just a boy, and this frightens me for his sake. The poor lad, bearing the mantle of the Boy Who Lived all the time except when he's with his muggle relations, who I intuit have not been very affectionate. He eats like a wolf cub at the other end of the Great Hall.

He wears his sleeves long.

A heavy fate is a terrible burden for a solitary soul.

Lessmore always used to say that I was the only person she had ever met who was more cynical about wizard society than she. But what would she have done, if she were here to see another great hope arisen in a society that takes no greater pleasure than knocking its gods off the pedestal?

If only there was something human left in me I would try to help, but I can scarcely focus on my elementary potions some days. I'm drowning in black lakes when I sleep and when I wake the darkness is bubbling just under my skin. Often I make the food vanish from my plate and steal up to my IV machine to imbibe my venous repast in solitude late at night.

While the boy is growing up I keep wallowing in my filth whenever Called, and then scrubbing myself raw afterwards. It would seem that my monstrous lifestyle has nothing in common with this Boy Who Lived, but Dumbledore doesn't hide it from me:

We both have a link to the same evil man.

It is my potions they use to treat his headaches and nightmares brought on by Voldemort's action on the scar through the years, but Dumbledore seems to be taking that annoying laissez faire attitude about this latest impending disaster: this child, and not just any child, being somehow tied to a madman.

"Aren't you going to do something?" I demand of Albus one night via slate, when I'm hooked to my machine at one end of the infirmary and Harry is vomiting from a migraine at the other. Our paths often cross in this way because Voldemort's magic reaches us both on those nights.

"He's at Hogwarts to learn how to defend himself and be around those who can understand him," Dumbledore writes in clear letters on the slate and walks away.

Case closed. I give myself another injection in my tongue that wants to say something black to the old man's back, and it is forgotten in my mind swimming with fish.

Did Voldemort consider that I was probably scheming with Albus?

Most certainly.

Did he for one moment think I would be able to do without the sex-magic-stealing-flaying cycle that was the only hint I was still alive?

Not at all.

Still, I don't want to put Dumbledore or anyone at the school in danger, so I try to play my parts well. Other than the abundant disgust I arouse at an instinctual level in Hogwarts—the castle, the faculty, the students—no one pays very much attention to the two-dimensional sneer flitting about the campus, so my double-agent activities are only important to me and the headmaster.

Rumbles occur during these years. Everyone knows people—mostly Mixed Bloods—are disappearing off the streets. They just don't realize that these unfortunate souls are going into the very, very Mixed Blood of another with mixed parentage just like their own.

These people can't resist their heart's desire. Voldemort chains me with a magical rope to a reliable henchman and I am dragged off, cloaked from head to toe, to press my finger against the unwitting victim in a pub or back alley.

Soon we are spirited back to the parlor and everyone watches the Half-blood eat the Half-blood.

"You can tell they're base life forms because of how they need each other so, even as they are destroying each other," a jaded woman with a pearl necklace says once over my copulation with an ecstatic woman picturing a lost love.

Voldemort tries to teach me how to discern someone's parentage by the way they feel to my special sense, and he is furious when I can't tell the difference between a Pure Blood's, a Mixed-Blood's and a Muggle-Born's magic flowing into my slavering mouth.

"That right there was a witch of the purest stock, and you couldn't tell?" He makes my arm bubble but there is no way for me to stave off this punishment because I truly can't see any difference. It's magic, the drug that I crave. That's all.

But these Death Eaters also do many, many more evil things besides what I am directly responsible for. They hide it from me and I do my best to decode their cryptic looks and whispered phrases.

So you see it is not at all true what they say—I don't know when the attacks come on Hogwarts or Harry until they happen.

This doesn't assuage my guilt, however.

So there are skirmishes and the Dark Lord and the Boy Who Lived case each other like bandits but only occasionally hurl the dagger.

And this was the fate the boy was growing into. Alone, as we all must. Or so I thought.

When Dumbledore volunteers me to teach lad Occlumancy at the beginning of his seventh year, I think it's a joke.

"You don't trust me to come within a foot of another living soul in this castle, yet you want me to have personal tutoring sessions in the private recesses of the mind belonging to the Savior of the Wizarding Class?"

"You've said yourself often enough, he's just a boy," Dumbledore reminds me. "Severus, you know as well as I do that Voldemort wants him for his own, or wants him dead. What would you have a boy just turned seventeen do?"

"I've never turned away a willing student," I mutter. We'll see if the boy is truly there at the lesson of his own accord.

Our first session he shows up on time and stands straight as a ramrod. "Thank you for teaching me," he says politely, his eyes holding me in their pincers a little less coldly than usual.

I'm in his mind before he can draw the next breath.

I had been afraid it would be difficult to resist merging with him as I have with so many others, but I'm too surprised by what I find. The childhood-misery vault every person has is surprisingly well-populated in this brain. He's been underfed since the beginning and serving at table since the age of five. I'm so taken aback that he pushes me out more easily than he should have.

"What was that? You were in my head!" he exclaims.

"Legilimency," I say dryly.

"I thought I was here to learn Occu-, Occlu- whatever," he says with an irritating lack of precision.

"Occlumancy is the study of blocking the threats posed by Legilimency," I say clearly.

"But you didn't even warn me!" he protests. I merely cock an eyebrow at him and he mutters, "Which is the way it will happen in real life."

I tilt my head with the closest he's going to get to approval and plunge in again.

The boy has some type of serious self-image problem. In his situation, even I would know that the majority of both genders were swooning at me, and I'm more or less hopeless when it comes to people. Instead, he has a lot of nightmares—I find a file that is heavily guarded and nudge in.

A black taste fills my mouth and I turn away to master the urge to vomit.

"Did I repel you?" he asks excitedly.

"Er, not exactly," I say, mostly recovered after a swig from my flask. It's almost worse to experience Voldemort through a young person's eyes. The rot I'm on intimate terms with is in this place a wave of pure, unadulterated terror.

"How did you learn to do this?" he asks. The boy is actually holding a conversation with me. Well, well.

"I've always known it," I reply. This is as much information as you get about my childhood.

He is impressed and doesn't deserve to be. "Aren't you a Parselmouth?" I say in a not-unfriendly tone.

"Yeah, but that's no big deal."

"I cannot do it." He is surprised at this admission. "I have a certain affinity for animals, but we do not converse. Or at least, they don't answer me back that I can tell."

"So you talk to them?" he asks mischievously.

"I would never take a feather from a bird for a potion without asking," I huff.

"So you don't pass the time of day," he presses with a smile.

"I have on occasion spoken to many animals," I respond quietly, thinking of the animals in my lonely forest wankings, and the sheep in Romania, and all the creatures in my parents' house.

And then he's in me.

He's watching me talk to the spiders and the mice in my parents' house, I almost drown myself trying to communicate with some fish in the frigid sea during an outing with my grandmother. He watches me talk to a falcon and ask it whether it's worthwhile to live. Apparently I've talked to animals more than I realized. Luckily all of it went on in my childhood pidgin language, all except the last memory—

The little finger of my mind pushes him out. Why did I let him stay that long? Even Voldemort doesn't get into my mind, or only what I wish to show him.

We gape at each other. Me and this teenager.

'"I had no idea—" he starts, and for a moment I am gripped with the terror that he has seen my True Face. "You get along better with animals than with people!"

"Well, try spreading that around the dinner table and see how many people believe you." The task at hand provides a useful cover for my momentary loss of control. "This is a lesson in Occlumency, not Legilimency. You are to shield. You are not to attack."

"Isn't this supposed to prepare me for the real world?" he asks with an innocence that doesn't fool me for a second. "Isn't that what your opponent would naturally do?"

No, actually, it isn't. No opponent watches me as a ragged boy of four make up songs to the spiders, my only playmates.

What is it in this awkward teenager that can get past the two-way door to my mind I've enjoyed perfect control over since infancy?

I am in him again.

A few moments of searching and suddenly James and Lilly's face loom up out of his earliest memory.

I stumble a few steps away so that the magical link is truly broken.

"I must have done it right that time," Harry exults. He can't make out those faces; they're the foundation of who he is but he doesn't know they are facial features belonging to his parents.

Those faces are two of the dearest ones in my life, and I had hoped to never encounter them with my present-day jaundiced eyes. I feel overgrown and filthy in comparison to their youthful love shining on their infant son. Their orange and blue burn me from inside with a purity now toxic to me and I shudder.

"Are you all right, Professor?" Potter makes a move to touch me.

"You will stay ten paces away from me at all times during lessons." The command comes from where I have sat down on a step. "And you will learn to do something about this Achilles heel," and then I am in his Voldemort file. I press a mental finger and he feels just a twinge of nightmare that has him reeling to the opposite end of the room. No one said education didn't involve pain.

"I don't talk about that, don't go in there," he shouts at me.

"A wizard is only as strong as his mastery of himself." He should heed the bitter truth from me, the prime example. "Every fear, every attraction or repulsion can and will be used against you in real life."

Potter is holding his scar and that makes me feel like a heartless bastard. I don't wish anyone a dip in that black pond. "What are you afraid of, then?" he murmurs and then looks like he regrets it.

"Moths," I answer automatically. "I ward myself against them before I go to sleep."

My fear of madness—and the Mantis Moths that it inevitably attracts—I've never told another living soul that! Next thing you know I'll be telling him I loved both his parents but no one has ever loved me.

He's nodding very seriously. Par la Rose-Croix! There will be droves of the loathsome winged creatures following me around at breakfast tomorrow.

My face must reveal my horror because Potter rushes to reassure me, "Don't worry professor. I'm good at keeping secrets. You've already seen what I'm afraid of, and I don't think you'll use it against me, even though you don't like me."

"We do not exist in the same realm, Mr. Potter. Students are not there for me to 'like', they are there for me to bully and browbeat into learning something."

This new Potter is nodding very seriously again. "I have some things to think about," he says as if the prospect were not too upsetting for a change. He gets up from where he's been sitting ten paces away from me. The lad offers me his hand, of all things! With a scowl I get to my feet on my own. "I'll practice for next time."

"Your volition is admirable but you will do no such thing!" I burst out and he takes a step back. "What we are doing is skirting the edge of dark magic!"

"I thought you said you could always do it," he says.

"Exactly," I rejoin and use the edge of my cloak to sweep him out the door.

Not much later Albus floos in unannounced to my quarters. "How was it?" he asks and I wonder if this man has ever gotten his kicks from anything other than meddling.

"He is very gifted," I say with unaccustomed directness. "He got in my head straight away."

Dumbledore takes his time brushing the floo powder from his robe. I can tell he's regretting putting me in this position. I can't stand thinking he's picturing me doing something inappropriate—sexually or magically—in a memory with a student as my witness. "Mr. Potter is fine—or at least, he left with no new nightmares to add to his collection. We had a very pleasant discussion of the virtues of conversing with animals. He saw me talking to spiders when I was little."

The headmaster settles with a sigh of relief in a chair I keep just for him and waits for me to offer him tea. "I'm surprised he got that far. Has anyone ever—?"

"My mother, my aunt, once or twice my grandmother. I thought it was only family," I say, busying myself with the teapot. "It won't happen again. Now that I expect it, it's not hard to keep him out."

"Did he learn to block?" he asks.

"On the first lesson? He's gifted, but he's totally without formation! Those muggles of his are simply the worst. Why didn't you let him stay here during breaks?" I set the tea things on a table and pour. He takes three sugars, unbelievably, and I conjure the memory of what I would be tasting if my tongue weren't black.

Albus smiles over his steaming cup. "I thought he was a coddled prince?"

I scowl into my tea. "I've said before and I will say again, he doesn't try. Today, however, I got a better sense of why that might be. This Hope for All Wizards exists in absolute terror of Voldemort. Whatever he could be, he won't be, unless he conquers that fear."

"And I know just the professor to help him do that," Albus says, smiling around a biscuit in his mouth.

Blast that man for drawing me into another of his schemes!

Madam Lessmore would be happy to see me trying to be a better man.

It's not easy. The insults well to my lips and no amount of chewing Silken Moonleaf will sop up the blackness. I swear the children are more frightened by my attempts to be kind than the usual gauntlet of rebukes.

After some trepidation I actually owl the retired nurse in Cape Verde and tell her I'm doing some research again. "What do you do for nightmares than can come during the day?" I write. "Do you have a favorite remedy against fear? For a normal person, not me, I mean. Purple with a tendency to pink, Active, Warm," and I realize how much I miss the little stillborn civilization we were building with our budding science.

The reply comes quickly by power of one of those dazzling tropical birds she sends, and we renew our correspondence for the first time in years. I'm in my laboratory at night, experimenting with potions and wishing for the millionth time that I had a normal constitution so I could test them on myself.

Pomfrey is unlikely to volunteer as a guinea pig the way her predecessor did on occasion, so when I think I've got it right I floo with the stoppered bottle in my pocket up to the headmaster's suite of rooms.

He is awake, which is not usual at two o'clock in the morning, but I'm too excited to think about having possibly woken him. "I think this might be it!"

The old man motions me to a chair and we sit there in our dressing gowns and beam at each other for a moment before the strangeness of our mood strikes me. "Well, it might possibly be of help," I amend.

"This is for young Harry Potter," he surmises. "And you need a guinea pig."

"If you know of anyone else in Britain who will willingly swallow something experimental made by my hand, by all means, I will knock on their door at this hour," I clutch the potion close to me.

"Give it here, Severus," he chuckles. "Your potions are always interesting."

"Humph," I unstopper the bottle and hand it to him. "Tell that to Pomfrey when you're in the infirmary with the Trembling Hives."

Albus drinks it and sits back. "What is this supposed to do, anyway?"

"Cause your agonizing death. Don't you think you should have asked that beforehand?"

Dumbledore takes his time replying. He is looking at me in an odd way. For a moment the fear that he has seen my True Face grips me. "Don't worry Severus. I just thought it would be all right to drop some of the wards between us for a moment," the other man says with a tiny bit less tension than had always been there in his voice.

"Are you mad? Don't touch me!" I back away.

"I don't plan on it," he says, smiling beatifically from his chair. "But I have you warded from here till Tuesday. You have no idea, in fact, the layers of magic that exist to convince your magic that nothing is there."

For once I don't know what to say. No one ever admits to the revulsion they feel about me. It seems too great a kindness after all he's done for me.

"I forced myself to touch your hair once, when you first came to us," he recalls. I've never noticed how wrinkled his skin is. Everything about him is so vivid, practically shining. "The experts I consulted, who knew less than nothing, as it turned out, all agreed that your hair was harmless. I didn't want to have any student here that I was so terrified of as I was of the ten-year-old Severus Snape. So I tousled your hair. And then I wasn't afraid any longer."

"Or not as much." Time seems to be moving very slowly. I can almost feel it licking around our faces like a languid cat.

"Or not as much," he agrees. "I wonder what would happen if you took this compound? I feel incredibly relieved to be letting this fear go."

"I don't know that it will do anyone much good for me to be less afraid," I smile wryly. "But seeing a trivial amount of tension leave you does me a world of good."

We smile at each other for a while and then my training kicks in. "Hermès! I haven't been tracking your reactions." I float a light over to his eyes and track his pupil dilations. In our new sense of trust I choose not to float the little reflex hammer over to him and instead use my hand to tap it against his knee. His leg jerks up like it normally would and he giggles. With a pair of forceps I test his skin turgor. He sticks out his tongue and it seems a normal color. I test his memory and a few other cognitive areas, and Albus passes everything with flying colors.

"How do I check out?"

"Would you allow me to look at your magic with my own?" This is something I have never done with him. "If you wish, you can try casting a spell for me to analyze."

He looks at me for a few long moments. "I think not, Severus. It is too risky for me to let down my guard to that extent. Even by releasing a spell in front of you so that you can see my magic in action."

Now it's my turn to grin. "That was the last test. Of course it would be foolish to do such a thing. I had to be sure that your inhibitions weren't diminished too much by your mild euphoria."

It's late and the experiment seems to have been a success. I gather my notes and instruments and prepare to leave. "You'll let me know if you experience any untoward effects?" I ask. "And give me a full report at breakfast regardless?"

"Certainly. Good night, Severus."

And Albus leaves out a few layers of wards between us from now on, except when I am very sick after being Called.

The headmaster does the impossible and wheedles a few more staff members to try the compound. When I experience an infinitesimal thaw in each of their attitudes towards me, we feel it's safe to try on Harry.

Pomfrey insists on calling in an outside Mediwizard to have standing by just in case. The doctor apparently knows who I am and isn't disgusted by what he knows. He asks me a lot of questions and tries to understand the Paracelsan method of sorting from a few examples I levitate from Pomfrey's storeroom. She is not amused by our rapport.

Harry is gamely submitting to some preliminary tests. "Don't you want to ask me what this experimental compound is?" I hiss at him when the nurse pours it into a small cup and gingerly sets it on a tray before him. "Possible side effects? Potential sequelae?"

"I don't know anything about potions, Professor, so whatever you tell me will go right over my head. But if you kill me they'll send you straight to Azkaban, and not even you want to go there."

Even I join in the laughter at that precocious remark. "Then get on with it, Potter," I snap.

Everyone holds their breath while he swallows. And I don't have to look into his mind to see him relax. The fear has been so all-consuming I'm surprised he didn't end up in St. Mungo's from an early age. He obviously has the ability to shield—or more accurately, to compartmentalize and repress—or he wouldn't be up and about doing things like a normal boy most of the time.

So far in our lessons I haven't been able to coax this ability to the fore, but he has started to fight me as I rifle through his memories. He's even tried to lash back a few times but it's easy to deflect. He's never going to grasp the key to my brain's unusual signature, and it frustrates him. I think about getting a normal person in for him to learn Legilimency on, but who?

Potter is sinking back into the pillows on his cot, and even Madam Pomfrey can see that something good is happening. "Are you all right?" she asks, almost with disappointment.

"Yeah," he laughs. "Thanks, Professor Snape. I see what you mean about fear dragging you down. Let's see if it works when I'm asleep, too."

His thanks actually reach me and I nod stiffly in response.

Gradually the crowd thins out until it's just Pomfrey, the Mediwizard named Floyd, and me. Harry suggests a game of cards to pass the time until he falls asleep. The ancient Whist cards are still in the drawer of one of the side tables after all these years. It touches me to deal out a hand using the same tattered cards Lessmore used when I was a boy sitting in the infirmary, unable to talk clear English. A chime goes off and Pomfrey picks up his wrist to take his pulse.

I have to turn away because of the unaccustomed dampness in my eyes.

"Are you all right, professor?" Potter asks.

"Pardon me, I must fetch my eye drops from my quarters," I say with a hand before my face. "A salt got in my eyes earlier and I'm still flushing it out."

I make my way using my internal magical sense so that I don't have to remove the hand from my eyes until I can slip into my rooms.

Have I cried in the last twenty years? Since I took The Mark? Though there has been plenty to mourn, I lost the habit, or stopped thinking I deserved it.

Seeing that normal, natural touch of a kindly nurse to a patient, a boy-wizard patient afflicted with an ailment beyond his years—

It decimated me. My deadly tears burn a hole in the carpet, and I'm very fond of that carpet. But I lie there on it sobbing my eyes out and don't move until there is nothing left. When it is over I wash my face with Laurel Blossom water and anoint the area around my eyes with an anti-inflammatory salve. My eyes feel like they're not red anymore, though Aunt Adele's twisted reflection stares at me unhelpfully from the mirror. There is no good explanation for what just happened, and it bears thinking on, but I want to see if the boy is dreaming yet. My hand is on my door when the black taste shoots from my arm up to my mouth.

I am Called.


	25. Chapter 25

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 25: The Dream Floo

The Severus that is actually trying to help someone other than himself fades away to nothing. He might as well not exist in that parlor.

Voldemort wants me to use the ability I've sworn I don't possess to try and extract information from someone. I'm not foolish enough to resist.

"You'll get your fill regardless," he says as if to a gluttonous child. How someone can be so skilled at manipulating people and such a poor judge of character is a mystery. My worst parts aren't my only parts!

The subject is a little potbellied nub of a man. He is naked and very frightened and I have to work to find his sensuality before he can sense mine. Having Voldemort leering noselessly over him can't help, but I'm not so stupid as to suggest he leave. Since the Dark Lord came back from the Beyond he has no sense of personal space with other people, though he's careful not to touch me. Like any good despot, he doesn't want to risk giving up any of his precious dark magic to the quicksand that is Severus Snape.

I run a hand up the man's arm. His eyes seem to focus somewhere just beyond my face, and I can sense he's seeing his heart's desire in my True Face. That this face isn't a mass of worms and corruption by now never ceases to amaze me.

The condoms are on and the little man relaxes somewhat. Voldemort grunts his approval. "Ask him how much the ministry knows about our plan."

I have to make a great effort to remember which nefarious plan he means out of all the ones I've been part and party to over the years. With a vague idea in mind I rub the subject's chest and concentrate on becoming transparent.

The man looks at me like Christmas and I'm in. Into his magic and his mind isn't far behind. Capturing thoughts in the present is much more difficult than rifling through someone's ingrained past, which is what most Legilimens do, and what I've done with Harry. With Lilly she greatly aided the process by acting as a willing and skilled participant.

I force myself into the rocking motion that is the man's thoughts and begin to catch some things. "My job, oh, my job when they find out. It's Pearline, Pearline isn't dead! How can she? Oh, just like that! If the ministry finds out I've told them about the dragons, they'll kill me, yes right there oh Merlin!"

I'm vaguely aware that our bodies are following their own agenda, but all the while I'm using every bit of my magic to remain calm while I discover

who else is in this man's mind.

My release is building but I slow it down at the same time that I bring the little man back from the edge. "Do you hear anything?" comes Voldemort's voice.

"He's enjoying himself," I say dully. "Let me try some more."

This gives me more time to go back to chasing down that magical signature. I know that fingerprint! Before I was dark my mind could have indexed it instantly, but as it is it takes another long minute of flesh slapping against flesh before I place it.

Harry Potter is in this unfortunate person's mind.

With the utmost naturalness I squeeze the man's climax from him and into the condom and shoot my noxious fluid into my own bit of rubber.

"I don't know," I say to Voldemort, completely used to conversing when naked by now. "It's like looking into a fog. I feel my pleasure and his pleasure and am doubly blinded."

Voldemort sits back in his chair. His wand is out before I even see him reach for it. How can anyone have reflexes that fast? He casts Cruciatus and I have to concentrate on cutting the sympathy that has grown up between me and the dying man so he doesn't take me with him.

"You disappoint me, Moon-calf," he says with the same bland inflection as always. "Perhaps I tire of feeding your appetites with so little in return."

The idea that he might set me free is simply too good to be true. I don't trust it. "Perhaps I will come looking for my pleasure wherever I can find it," I say just as coolly. He catches the reference to himself. All it takes is one moment's contact that shows him my True Face, and we will consume each other into some sucking void of evil and he knows it.

"You know where to find me," Voldemort replies. He knows I'm forever on the fence, too weak to be wholly good or wholly bad. The hazard of the Half-breed. He's told me so many times. "But in the meantime, I may have a better weapon than you. One that doesn't drip through my carpet."

He thinks he wounds me by turning away while I get dressed and leave, but I am grateful for the mental space it allows me. I wander around in the dark for a long time, until it starts to grow light. Experience has shown that the castle shutters itself from the evil I exude right after I come back from a Call.

Finally I am allowed to enter the school and go straight up to Dumbledore's. He looks at me tiredly and waits for me to stick my tongue out so he can assure me it's not gangrenous and about to fall off.

"It's still attached, Severus."

The ritual completed, I talk as fast as I can before my tongue swells up too much. The news that ministry officials are being targeted by Death Eaters makes him frown, though he seems to know about this dragon scheme already. But Albus is aghast at the idea that Harry was somehow in this poor man's mind while I was having him.

"He was with someone named Pearline," I reassure him as well as I can. "If Potter saw anything, it was this man having the time of his life with Pearline."

"And when he experienced Cruciatus?" he whispers.

Silence.

"I don't know, I had to pull out of his mind at that point," I say thickly, my tongue beginning to swell beyond the confines of my mouth.

Dumbledore floos me to the infirmary so that I can be hooked up to the IV and can give myself an injection in my tongue so I don't choke on it. No matter what species of needle I try, it seems to cause an allergic reaction at the entry site, so they place my favorite salves by my side to alleviate the itching and irritatio that will soon come to my arm and tongue. All of this happens in my usual bed, which is within sight of Harry's but not so close that Pomfrey's efficient but revolted activity will bother him.

I summon my slate and chalk. "How is Potter?"

She sniffs. "Some success your potion was. Dr. Floyd had to sedate him he was in such a state from his nightmare."

"Where is the doctor now?" I write.

She nods at her office. "He's taking a nap on the cot for an hour or two. He wants to examine Harry thoroughly once he's woken up."

"What did you use to sedate him?" I begin writing, wondering how deeply his magic might be stilled, but my question is answered for me when the boy jolts awake. He blinks without his glasses, straining to see in the dim light.

"What is it? Pearline? Is that you?" He vaults out of his bed and gets three steps closer to me before I throw up a shield that blocks the very air.

"What have you done? I can't breathe!" Pomfrey clutches her throat.

"Sorry, perhaps that was a little drastic," I choke out and adjust the shield so we can breathe.

The nurse gets a second wave of panic. "Is he—? How could you, you rotten man?" she shouts at me.

"I have done nothing," I write patiently. "Against my express instructions Mr. Potter has been practicing Legilimency this evening and it seems our paths have crossed."

She is so disgusted she actually spits on her spotless floor. "Why they let a monster like you around children is beyond me." It seems to do her good to say what she's been thinking all this time. "Kindly let me through this shield."

I allow her through and seal myself safely away from the world, with my tongue and my slate for company. The IV is pinching me so I adjust the needle a little. They let me sleep through the morning because I can't teach very well via slate, so Dumbledore has either taught my classes himself or roped in one of my unwilling colleagues. The idea of Filch babysitting my students makes me smile a little in my dream.

I open my eyes to Dumbledore's worry-ravaged face and the smile evaporates.

"How bad is it," I say with my tongue flopping in my mouth, leaving room for any number of tragedies.

"He's seen this woman Pearline through that man's eyes and is—quite smitten with her."

"So he hasn't seen my Face," I hazard. "He just recognizes the feeling from his dream."

"Did you have any idea that he was going into the Dark Circle's minds while he was dreaming? Didn't you have any hint that he was in the man's brain before you began draining him?"

It's unusual for Dumbledore to lash out at anyone, but he needs someone to blame. I don't mind.

"Harry had an extensive section of his mind devoted to fear and Voldemort as one and the same. I didn't dwell there and try to sort it all out, and I left it completely alone after Mr. Potter expressly told me to. And no, Albus, you know I have a hard time getting a clear read on someone in the present until I'm actually in their magic."

The two of us piece together a theory over the late breakfast that he eats and I absorb through my arm. Harry must be the "secret weapon" Voldemort was referring to. He's obviously realized that a link exists through the scar and that it can be manipulated both ways. Perhaps he's been trying to master this connection for years.

Dumbledore's intuition that such a connection might exist was correct, and his order that I teach Harry to shield was very shrewd. But we had no idea how actively the two of them had been moving back and forth along this connection.

What Voldemort expects to learn through a seventeen-year-old who has mostly stumbled into—and out of—his fights is unclear. But what is more worrisome is the idea that this same seventeen-year-old has probably been seeing every species of depravity in Voldemort's parlor. The Dark Lord's magic must be all through everyone and everything in that place, but given what I describe as his interpersonal tone-deafness he's unable to make good use of his reach. Harry, however, might have free reign over the entire dark network—

"Did you see anything like—like that—in Harry's mind?" Albus asks for the tenth time, and I tell him again that nothing sexual jumped out at me but it might have just been folded into the general fear.

I think of my own sexual education in the Restricted Section of the library and hope Harry hasn't been exposed to the worst of sexuality before he knows who he is.

This reminds me of my crying jag earlier. I pull out the slate because it seems easier to write than fight with my tongue. And I don't want to hear myself say this. Dumbledore watches me trace the words across the surface, filling the space up several times with questions.

My old friend lays a hand on my hair. "I was hoping that would happen," he says with a tired smile and walks out with his teapot and tea service floating behind him.

A smite upon that man for acting like he is the author of the whole world!

The next day I return to classes and rely on my arsenal of glares as much as possible rather than talking. Harry is in a warded wing of the castle while the best wizarding minds try to distract him from his obsession.

One of the boy's friends looks at me a little too closely. It's that girl, Granger, the annoying one. I reinforce the shield around me and push her away a little for good measure. She goes back to her book. I make a mental note to track what she's been checking out of the library, and a special note to make sure that the Bigham's Big Book of Sexual Incongruencies has been exploded into smithereens as it should have long ago.

It occurs to me that I was right around Harry's age when I found out I was a cancer to wizard society. Slightly younger, rather, since I was a year ahead of my peers. Why couldn't he be content with the fraction of a normal boy's life left to him after you subtract the Boy Who Lived part? But he had to go snooping in the darkest place he could find.

When push comes to shove, I don't want anyone experiencing the kind of darkness I've lived with, so I'll help if a fallen creature like me can help. But Harry, I'm finding, is especially hard not to like. At some point I've joined his side. I smile wryly around my still-tender tongue.

Harry is much less pleased with me, however, when we manage to break the hold the image of this dead woman has over his mind. It takes several days and all of my ingenuity to come up with an antidote, and it requires a compromise Albus doesn't like to make.

"Plant a lie in his mind?" he says again.

"I'll just let him in to that fabricated memory and he's bound to accept the idea that I've done something malevolent as fact."

That night, I stand in the doorway of his chamber—I couldn't cross the barrier if I tried—and press on his awareness a little to make sure he is awake and knows I am there. His febrile teenage desire is awakened by the magical stamp he associated with "Pearline" the first time he encountered it. Yet at the same time I watch this desire throttle him, I see his confusion that it is mixed with some oily essence I assume must be his idea of "Snape." His curiosity aroused, it doesn't take long for him to look away from his imaginings and try to breach my mind as he did once before.

In a second Potter is advancing down the path I laid for him, watching the fictitious memory of me making a potion that was designed to distract him with some type of teenage lovesick delirium. The whys are kept deliberately vague, but the whole thing comes packaged with the idea that I think he will be too stupid to figure out how to get out of it—by seeing it as the figment of his imagination it really is. Who stays in lust with a dream, after all? Just the sort of lazy mind I have often told him he is.

Potter is thrust out of my mind as if I've just discovered him there. I even treat him to a little mock-flounce with my robe as I leave.

He feels like the most cunning boy in Hogwarts, and I'm not feeling too shabby myself as I go tell Albus.

"Thanks for the potion, Professor." The lovesick teenager has been replaced by the much-safer sarcastic teenager. "I missed a week of class."

"You're welcome, Mr. Potter," I reply mildly. "As I said, any unmastered desire can be used against one in a time of battle."

And then he is battering against my shields and I wait until he tires. "That's what got you in trouble the other night," I point out. "If you don't learn to block you have no business floundering about in someone's mind."

This brings him up short. "How do you know what I was doing?" he demands. "Were you inside my nightmare?"

So, he files these excursions into the parlor as nightmares. Dumbledore and I have discussed my next move and it is a difficult maneuver. "I learned your magical signature when I was in your mind during one of our lessons," I say. "I can follow it in your dreams much better than your waking state because there is so much less going on than when you're awake."

I've actually never tried to follow someone's dreams, but he accepts the idea with no question even as it disgusts him.

"You've been poking around in here after hours, Snape?" he says without bothering to call me by my proper title. "Anything strike your fancy?"

None of the students would be caught dead thinking of me as a sexual being, so I don't take this as a gibe against my hidden preferences.

"Dumbledore told me to watch over you and that included making up for some noted deficiencies in your blocking and—constitution." That much is true. "I was merely alerted when your consciousness actually left your body and the castle. No more."

His face almost seems disappointed for some reason. He must have been hoping for a nefarious motive to resent.

"But if you would like to share your dreams with me I have taken some courses in Psychoneutics," I offer modestly.

He snorts. "Dream on, Snape. You're the last one I would trust with my deepest self."

Now that I have lied about it, the idea of trying to figure out when his mind goes wandering actually seems like a splendid idea. I convince Albus to let down some of the wards between me and the Potter boy so that I can sense—with several floors of stone between us—if he might be traveling back to Voldemort's den. Perhaps he does so unconsciously.

"Lock me in my rooms, seal up my fireplace, do whatever you like, but otherwise we are left with nothing to do but wait for him to stumble onto some grotesque orgy," I remind the headmaster.

He makes me a prisoner in my suite every night, and I open myself to the purple-pink note that I recognize very clearly as Harry. It's much brighter now than all the other warded magics, which seem to come to me through smoked glass. As the vibrations slow a little when he slips into sleep, it is not difficult to learn to go on alert, but nothing happens for several nights.

Only on the fourth night, when I am asleep myself, does the image of a moth beating itself against a thick pane of clear glass come to me. Usually I would be repulsed by a moth, but this one is the most beautiful purple-pink color. It wants so badly to get to the flame on the other side of the glass, but I know it shouldn't.

Sitting up in bed I start shaking against the wards to wake Albus.

"Let me out," I cry when his head appears in my restored fireplace. "He's probably traveling right now."

"You can't go with him," he replies firmly. "Leave this to me, and I'll tell you how he is in the morning."

"You're right," I agree.

My mind starts reaching for him as soon as the old man's head disappears from my chimney.

It's not something that ever occurred to me before, but it suddenly seems like the subconscious could be one great Floo network. If Harry and Voldemort can sneak back and forth on their line, why can't I map my way to them too?

It takes some time before I can get out of Hogwarts with my mind, but once I do, everything is very bright and moving very fast. The world is a rich velvet black and the colored magics stand out like fireflies. There is a cluster of variegated magical signatures that must be Hogsmeade, and I wheel around the English countryside sensing various clusters of colored lights. Being able to pinpoint without any doubt where the magical beings are in Britain would be a very dangerous knowledge for a certain dark wizard. The idea tempers the exhilaration that comes from flying through the dark searching for one purple-pink dot.

It's never been possible for me to locate Voldemort's lair on the face of the earth, though it must exist somewhere. He's found a way to fold space over itself and hide, or so I thought until tonight.

There he is. I have no way of later tracing this "there" but at the moment, Harry's magical fingerprint is right before me, though somewhat obscured by the fact that it's burrowing inside a familiar yellow color.

Hermès Trismégiste! That's Lucius!

Knowing full well what the man was capable of when he rationalized the perversions he so enjoyed with me in our youth—and suspecting him also much changed since he took the Mark—I almost attempt some sort of totally ill-advised dream attack, but stop in time. Voldemort must not sense what is going on essentially under the aegis of his subconscious—me chasing Harry chasing whatever he's looking for. Otherwise a whole new vista of power would open up for the Dark Lord, and he'd use me to tap it.

Instead, I ease up to the yellow streak to see if it is obvious what is going on.

"My son tells me the Potter boy has been ill," Lucius is saying, and I feel his pride at being able to share something Voldemort doesn't know.

"Ill? In what way?" comes the flat voice.

"Apparently Snape has been using him as a guinea pig for some experiment," Lucius says and I wonder if he could possibly be aware of how dangerous this statement is.

"He has, has he?" The evil creature (who looks like a god through Lucius' eyes) thinks for a moment. I've been feeding him disinformation about my supposed Spagyrics studies through the years, but I thought everyone in my life had become accustomed to the idea that I would never deliver on any of my promise. "And what is the purpose of this experiment?"

"Spite. You know Snape was in love with the elder Potter," Lucius is prattling on. "But he's always disliked the boy. Potter was in a delirium for days."

"Perhaps our pet Snape is a little more of a deviant than he has been letting on," Voldemort says mildly, as if he were the picture of normalcy. "This is excellent news. Well done, Lucius,"

I can feel a sensation like a dog wagging his tail welling up within Malfoy when the purple vanishes from my awareness. Harry is gone.

It is easy for me to return to my body in Hogwarts, much easier than getting out of it, so in a few moments I'm pounding against the wards in my chamber. "Albus! What have you done!"

My fireplace unseals and I floo up to the bed where they've been keeping Harry in isolation. "Mr. Potter has just woken up from a nightmare," Dumbledore says.

But the young man in question is looking at me as if the nightmare continues.

He tries to drum into my mind on several fronts:

Point one: That I loved his father.

Two: That I am using him as part of a spiteful experiment, and

Three: That I have a taste for young boys, particularly him.

This last is intolerable even for me. "Professor Dumbledore, a word," I hiss.

"Send me to Azkaban. Preserve me in a vat of Evermort Elixir, do whatever you like to me, but you must prevent Harry from doing any more dream traveling," I rage as soon as we are alone and Albus is filled in on our night's wanderings. "If he thinks me capable of the most filthy impulses towards him, so much the better reason for him to keep his distance, but he can't be exposed to more espionage and perversion. Lucius had some rather specific reactions when Voldemort referred to me as their 'pet.'"

"If Voldemort tried to compel you to—enjoy—–the boy, would you be able to resist?"

"It's not a matter of me resisting—it's he that wouldn't be able to resist. It could happen by accident. He nearly touched me our first lesson! All it will take is the slightest contact, a moment when I stop guarding my True Face, and then we're both done for, Albus! He's a boy of seventeen—he'll shag anything, especially someone that beckons with the promise of true union."

"And how likely is that to kill him?" Dumbledore muses. "Most of your victims merely live without magic for a week or so."

We are not talking about this. "You do want to see me face the Dementors' Kiss."

"Sixteen is the age of consent, Severus. Everyone knows that." He pauses. "Or perhaps we tried to obscure that fact with you."

"The boy is of age but he is my student. You think the Dementors will overlook this fact? Or his muggle guardians, for that matter?"

"We just have to make it until he graduates. After that point, if something happens, we will try to minimize the damage," Dumbledore declares, and not for the first time I wonder if I'm actually the one with the morals out of the two of us. "Several of us aware of the problem now, so no attempt by Voldemort to use your condition as a way to neutralize Harry's magic will go on for long within these walls. Most of your—partners—have survived with no noticeable long-lasting effects."

The image of a sickly James returning to school after being nearly drained by me flashes before my eyes, with the crazed Lilly following close behind. Not again.

"Of course. You are absolutely right. No need to catastrophize." It hurts me that my friend thinks I would agree to this unethical idea. I still know right from wrong! "It's been a rather long night. Do you think someone can cover my morning classes?"

"Certainly, Severus. Sometime you must tell me more about traveling by Dream Floo."

"I'll try to make it to lunch," I say.

Within an hour I've discreetly assembled some supplies and convinced the castle to distract from my exit for as long as possible. The old stone beast is only too glad to conspire in aid of my definitive departure.


	26. Chapter 26

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 26: Severus Rex

_The Sage says_

_That a wild beast is in the forest,_

_Whose skin is of the blackest dye._

_If any man cut off his head,_

_His blackness will disappear,_

_And give place to a snowy white._

_-The Book of Lambspring_

Soon I've taken off my boots and shrunk them into my pack. It feels good to be outside again. These days I only get out when I'm trying to leech off some of my cursed potency.

The idea comes to me as it does sometimes that it's good I've been very rigorous about using condoms through the years. Otherwise there might be a legion of children with unfortunate noses and deadly powers running around England by now.

With each of the mothers running the risk of being digested in the process.

I'd have cut it off before now if I thought that would happen. My laboratory tests have all suggested, however, that I am too much of a monster to create more little monsters. Nature's way of containing her error, I suppose.

The dry grass crunches underneath my tender insteps and the ground hasn't warmed up from the October frost, but I am glad of the discomfort. It's not clear to me whether a magical or muggle forest will be better for my plans, so I allow my feet to carry me wherever they will. It is one of those rare times when no one is pushing towards or away from anything.

Some birds swoop by overhead and I say to them, "Where is the best place to perform surgery, do you think?"

They fly in a black arrow towards the northwest. "Thank you," I call, thinking of Harry Potter watching me talk to animals. As I make my way in the direction indicated, my mind is completely relaxed and I think about Lilly as I seldom have since I lost her. If we had managed to stay together, we could have had a child. Everything would have been different, and I wouldn't be having to make this dark errand into the forest. I would have a family.

The sun is coming up hot on my neck though my feet are numb with cold. The amusing thought occurs to me: since James and Lilly found each other after me, the savior of wizarding-kind is in some insignificant way a product of my aberration.

My breath scatters the cloud of dried thistle blossoms stirred up by my step. There are some black birds sitting on a rock near a small stream. They huff a little bit as I approach and stare at me for a moment before they fly off. This must be a good place. I reach out with my mind and try to sense any magic nearby, but this appears to be muggle territory. So much the better.

Pulling a few instruments out on a blanket, I take a swig from a phial and begin sawing off my left arm.

My exercise in removing The Mark includes no attempts to be sterile. This is either a suicide or a necessary step to take out the rot from within me once and for all. If I get the hang of it, perhaps I will neuter myself as well. Either way I will go to my new restful future free of sickness.

The anesthetic I brought wears off halfway through but by this time I am exhilarated. The blackness I have been living with all this time is clearing! I'm growing weak from blood loss by the time I finish. The last blissful sight I see is the severed limb oozing a black fluid into the grass.

My body goes into shock. That's the only explanation for why I didn't wake until it was too late.

When I open my eyes again the two parts of my arm have knit themselves back together with only the faintest seam.

What happened next is a blur. I remember downing some of the potions at random from my bag, but I can't tell if that was to stop the hallucinations or start them. All I know is I talked to an audience of a dozen birds, a hundred, a thousand. The sky grew black with birds and I could clearly hear them asking each other,

"What is that unearthly sound?"

Apparently my screams of horror and impotence at seeing the Mark still attached to me carried so far that species from as far away as Iceland sent a bird to investigate.

Basilius Valentinus

Basilius Valentinus, Azoth, Paris, 1659

Finally my mind has pieced itself together, somewhat less successfully than my arm, and I understand. I roll in the dirt and curse my mother's grave for ever giving birth to me, the freak who apparently cannot be vivisected by any known instruments.

There's a trick to cutting my hair, but if there's one for parting my flesh I don't know it. I can't even cut off a tiny slice of my finger. The blade won't bite in properly. Or if I do manage to hack of a small sliver of skin I'm treated to the nauseating spectacle of the epithelia reaching for each other blindly. Never has my alien system been so visible to me as I try to fillet myself. Not that I ever tried before now. Swearing, I think of the discomfort of the IV needle and realize my body is always trying to push it out.

Unbelievably, my body is optimistic enough to be hungry. The cold is pooling around me along with the growing dark, and I feel utterly ashamed. This arm that leashes me to a madman won't come off, my hated member is still firmly attached to my crotch, and I didn't even bring the Capillar-Comb needed to shear my head in penitence.

The horrible thought that I couldn't kill myself if I tried sets me running through the bracken, which scratch me deeply. Perhaps I could scratch away with a twig and rub enough dirt into the wound to get a deadly infection? Or maybe I should drip something sweet on one of my offensive parts and try to feed it to a Hippogriff. Excitedly, I rummage through my bag but I didn't bring any food, much less the jam that Hippogriffs would prefer.

I wander until my feet give out and then scrabble around to make a nest of leaves. There are a few little treats in my knapsack. Over the years I have taken stupefacients very rarely, knowing that they have been the undoing of more than one potion master. Christmas, my birthday, especially depressing winter evenings have all been occasion for me to experiment upon myself in the name of forgetting.

China Cheer is a useful basis for most people but not at all strong enough for me on its own. I don't need to get intoxicated; I need to really see for a little while that I am not a monster. A few drops of something in my now-tasteless tea, a sprinkle over my breakfast, and I note any slight sense of self-forgiveness. Over the years I've hit upon a few compounds that will bring temporary relief, but no lie is as strong as the truth. Eventually I have to return to class with a terrifying hangover and the sense that my magic might disobey me for the next few days. Sometimes I have to bring out my Rosetta Ring because I'll slip into my childhood pidgin of languages in the middle of class. But mostly I can't make the effort to stay high.

There are years' worth of intoxicants shrunken in my bag, however, and I intend to succumb to inanition with a bang.

"Let's see here," I say in the glow of my ball of light. "Do you think a nice fungus will take the edge off or perhaps a sip of Inverted Sundew?" The glowworm I'm taking to nods to the phial of sundew, so I restore it to normal size and take a daring swig. The warmth spreads down my throat all the way to my mistreated feet. Perhaps I can overdose on my store of artificial good cheer! I think happily, snuggling into the oaky-smelling leaves.

A black fox has come to investigate the creature burrowing away from the night air, and I greet it. "My good sir, I do hope this was not your favored resting spot. It is most comfortable and I don't want to get up."

"Not at all," the fox says. "The hunting is not good around here, I'm afraid."

"No matter, no matter," I wave at him languidly. "I won't be needing anything."

He bows slightly and scampers off. Did I bring my Ring? Is that why we could converse? I dig deeper into the dirt chasing a warm streak, find it, and continue the thought: I'd never noticed the setting for Fox before. How could I have missed it? It's rather like Gaelic.

Something lands quite close. A lovely russet owl. "This won't do at all," she says. "Let me bring you a nice mouse."

"Don't do that," a mouse pipes up. "I hear beetles can be quite tasty."

"I beg your pardon," grumbles a magnificent horned beetle such as I used to play with as a child.

The forest is full of voices arguing about who will be eaten, and I wrap my long hair around me and say, "Don't worry. I shan't be eating anyone." They all murmur and sigh and things get quiet again and I sleep.

Someone is looking at me. Or rather, over the shoulder of my sleeping self, into my memories.

Harry Potter turns toward me in his purple robe. "You left the door open," he says with a shrug.

"And have you enjoyed your stay here?" I ask hospitably. "There are some rather nice memories in the Romania section."

"I saw some of those. You like the outdoors," he says and looks at my bare feet. "I'm not angry with you."

I laugh for so long he looks uncomfortable. "And I was just beginning to think you had some sense," I manage to wheeze out.

The Potter boy starts rummaging around my brain and pulling out memories, piling them on top of each other, making towers, knocking them down, making a new sense of things and then erasing it and starting again. All I can do is stare at this young man who is talking to me from a place no one has ever been invited into, and I don't know what he's saying or even if that's important. He's here and he's arguing with me about some key failing I can't be bothered to understand.

"With or without Voldemort, I was going to see these things," he gestures to the ransacked shards of my life. "Some of this is as much mine as yours."

"Do whatever you like, I don't need them anymore," I say. The potion is wearing off in my dream and I feel lethargic.

"Now you can drink yourself to death," he says not unkindly, gathering a few things up in his cloak.

In a moment he is gone, as is the purple color that had suffused my now-colorless thoughts. A white owl is looking at me disapprovingly. I can feel the Boreweevils climbing around inside my clothes. My mouth is dry. The owl squawks something that I can still understand as "Pitiful" as I clamber out of my earthen bed and stagger toward the stream.

The day is spent stumbling vaguely towards the north and weaving a sun-shade to protect my dilated eyes from the bright light. The night comes as a relief and I make my little experiment this time with a mushroom preserved over many years. Just a few spores on the tongue will make a muggle feel magic. I take an entire bite.

At dawn I become aware of an audience of animals watching me rubbing myself full-length against a shape I have molded in the dirt. "What are you doing?" a wild ferret asks.

"I'm not an exhibitionist," I gasp, right on the edge of climax.

"No, you're very Congruent," the form says as it reaches up out of the dirt and pulls my mouth into a kiss as I explode.

I wake up choking on something and fear it is the black taste and I am being Called wherever it is I am.

But there just dirt in my mouth. There is nothing around but miles of sky and scrubby earth. A bird says something but it is too far away to register as anything other than a "caw!"

By following the bird I find a small pool of water gushing out of rock and wash the dirt from my mouth.

The fine layer of earth coating my skin feels good. The mats in my hair seem just right. I should be getting weaker from not eating but my potions seem to be staving off the inevitable. No matter. I've never felt death so close, and it is the opposite of what blackens my mouth. I take many more sips of water and wonder if it is drawing from a vein of arsenic or other toxin deep in the earth. Because this is the taste of death and it is strong and clean on my tongue, which recognizes it, molds itself around it, becomes it.

I wake up next to the pool and it is nearly night. Not wanting to lose hold of the wonderful dream I was just having, I pick something at random from my pack and swallow it before lying back down to rejoin the dream.

"You're pathetic," the dream began some time ago with Harry saying.

"Most definitely."

"Repugnant,"

"I won't deny it."

"Unnatural,"

"I couldn't agree more," I'm laughing thinking of his brain madly searching for more adjectives.

"Stop agreeing with me! And stop laughing!" His is a boyish anger verging on something else, but I can't stop laughing.

"You're high," he spits.

"More likely delirious from hunger and the intoxication is just making it feel good," I correct him.

"Who will teach me Occlumency?" he demands, suddenly despondent.

"By the looks of it, you've mastered Legilimency dangerously well," I say. "Block me," and I slip inside his mind.

He's filed all the memories he stole from me. They don't look so bad by the light of his mind. His version is that I had a brief, passionate schoolboy affair with his father—and his godfather. That some of those memories overlap confuses him but he stores them carefully all the same. Luckily my memories of Lilly have been bolted away so that I have a hard time finding them myself. Instead, Harry has sensed the ache I felt over his mother and made it his own, finally seeing her as more than just a sacrifice. And maybe a little like Hermione—intelligent, defensive, always trying to make up for what they felt to be a deficiency in their upbringing.

In this vision it becomes clear that Potter is not sure what kind of beast I am. He does, however, feel sorry that I have some illness that makes it difficult to be around people. He thinks I have been abused, as Lilly did, and that's why I can't let people touch me.

It's a great kindness, getting to see the illusions he's built up for me. Then I see the last memories, the ones glimpsed through Lucius, with the most disturbing the questions he can't answer. The brief flashes of what Lucius likes to do to me he saw in the older man's mind before leaving it.

I pull away and see that I'm at the stream. With the help of a potion I return to the dream once again. "This is not my wish, to share these things with you. I still have a will and that is why I am covered with dirt and you are safe at school where you belong. And you will be just fine there without me."

"Don't you ever get lonely?" The Boy Who Lived asks, peering a little way into my recent wanderings.

I'm too tired to block him. "You see my animal hosts won't seem to leave me alone."

He looks wide-eyed at the memory of assorted creatures watching me rut into the dirt. He's going to ask me why I'm doing that and I'm pushing him out trying to think of an explanation, when he asks, "Who is that?"

The dirt figure is rising out of the ground once again. It is closing its wonderfully silky muddy mouth on me—

"Get out get out!" Every window and door to my brain slams shut as I sink into the welcoming earth and roll in the perfect warm texture of the soil, coating my pale skin with it until you can't tell where I end and the mud-man begins.

The tendrils of Potter's mind begin growing through the cracks in my head like Creeping Dandervines. I tear myself away from his purpleness and begin streaking through the forest, hearing the mud-man's footfalls close behind. If only I could transfigure, transfigure, do it, do it now. But all I can think of turning into is a teapot, and the idea of the mud-man wearing me as a hat is too horrifying—

He is every man I have ever tried not to love. He is James come to reclaim the magic I stole from him. He is Sirius, with a beauty so hard it hurts me. He is my father, who is no longer a muggle but a powerful wizard come to make me answer for my mother's death. He is every man I have ever drained or killed.

I stumble over a root and sprain my ankle. So much the better. Any place will do as my deathbed. The rich earth beckons to me and I vaguely hope that I choke on its kiss this time as I fall asleep.

The next morning the rain awakens me. I'm very thirsty and lie there like a baby bird with my mouth open for a long time, drinking.

"You look a treat," a rough voice says over my shoulder. I turn and hurt my ankle in the process. There is a boar talking to me from a yard away. My hated left hand reaches automatically to turn the Rosetta Ring to make his speech unintelligible. Then I realize I'm completely sober, there is no ring and the boar is still talking. "Have you had enough yet?"

"Apparently not, as I'm still among the living," I snap. The boar turns away with a grumble and I crawl, then limp, after it to the fresh water. We drink together.

"Why do you have to make everything hard on yourself?" he asks conversationally.

"What else would you have me do?" I query. "It's very nice out here. Perhaps I'm safe in this neck of the woods."

I drowse by the water and feel the cold as a serious threat for the first time. Apparently I'd been automatically warming myself with my magic, but my energy seems to be running low. My heart leaps with hope. At last. Maybe this is the end. Hypothermia is very pleasant, I hear.

I wait and wait, and after awhile realize that what I'm truly impatient for is for it to get dark so I have a chance to dream again. After that horrible dream about the man made of mud?

When the purple color flashes in my mind's eye, I realize I've been waiting for Harry.

He's surveying my dreams from last night with a frown. "Are you seeing my present or my memories?" I ask in confusion.

"I don't know," he asks with boyish excitement. "Maybe we can see the future!"

Together our awareness opens up—

We see exactly what I've been trying to protect him from. At first I think it's a memory of some regrettable act I've performed in Voldemort's parlor, but gradually this unknown body with mine starts to make a different kind of sense to me.

Though the form is all new to me, the inside is a familiar purple-pink.

"Don't look at this," I say.

"But it's me!"

"No it's not. Not yet. Not ever, if I can help it."

"What if it's happening when I've graduated?" he asks sensibly.

"Breaking the trust Hogwarts has deposited in me as an instructor would still be the last thing I need." It suddenly seems the height of foolishness to lie to someone who's inside my thoughts while I'm dying in the woods. "Or rather, this is exactly what I need, but it can't happen that way."

"I can't wait to feel that," Potter says as if this is definitely going to happen.

"Have you ever—" I start to ask and realize it's a wholly inappropriate question. "You mean you actually want this to happen?"

An avalanche of images showing us together zips before our united minds. It's too fast to grasp anything except the sheer volume of this future. Then it focuses on the two figures as they drowse together in tangled sheets. The Harry figure watches the other man sleep. Reaching on the bedside table, he uses his wand to snuff out the wall sconces and pull the blanket over him.

That's impossible. "Your magic—it's intact after we-."

"Maybe I'm different because of the scar," he suggests. "If you can be different, why can't I?"

"Mr. Potter," I pull the shreds of my mind together. This may be one of my last rational moments with him before death. "Choose one of the dozens of young witches who are in love with you. I'm a broken-down freak and you're bewitched by my condition."

Then I give him a slideshow of my worst memories. I hold nothing back. At the end of it I am terribly tired and just wait for him to pull out of my mind.

"Severus," he says my name like I have never heard it. "It's going to happen. It's up to you whether it happens the easy way or the hard way. I'll be here, regardless." And the purple light winks out.

The next days are a blur of sun and stars. I'm too numb to be cold. Random potions from my bag are washed down with water lapped from the pool that vaguely reflects Aunt Adele's face. Different animals come close to me and sometimes they talk but I'm unable to follow the thread of conversation.

I'm dying. It's so close that I can taste it—the first taste since I took the Mark. I close my eyes and see myself as a boy. So alone, so proud, practicing the Paracelsan method with beetles and Animate mosses only too glad to play the game, though I scold them for mucking up the categories by wandering about. Another boy approaches. Also thin, also furtive and grateful for a few bits to use as an imaginary world. "You all alone?" he asks me.

"Oui," I say. "Regarde le scarabée," and pick up a great stag beetle and hand it to him carefully while prattling a little in French. He frowns, not understanding, but we play companionably together until he gets up to go. I make a disappointed noise.

"You can come visit me any time you like," he says. The weight of a loneliness too large for a child's heart crushes me. It's choking me—

I sit up, gasping, my breath visible in the air. A deer is frozen in the act of bending down to the pool. "Oh, it's you," she says, and goes on drinking.

"I suppose there's nothing to be done about it," I say with less bitterness than expected. "How far am I from Hogwarts?"

"Not terribly far, but you'll never get there in this state," she observes. "You waited too long. We'll have to find someone who can take you."

"Putrefaction is so effective that it destroys the old nature and form of the rotting bodies; it transmutes them into a new state of being to give them a totally new fruit. Everything that has live, dies; everything that is dead putrefies and finds a new life." (Pernety, 1758)

That morning I drink small amounts of water at regular intervals and lie quietly, knowing that the talk of the forest is Severus Snape. The animals decide it would be best if a Dromedary Moose carries me back because I can sit between its humps with little effort. Some of the birds lash me and my bag to his back with vines. The next day and night are spent feeling a rare sensation of safety with the wooly hide underneath me and the moose's bass voice singing the ballads that have been passed down from time immemorial to his kind.

"It will work out, you'll see," he rumbles as we approach the castle at dusk. He insists upon taking me through the grounds and kicks at the reluctant castle door until he gets it to let me in the courtyard. Those students and staff that happen to be at the front of the castle are treated to the sight of an emaciated, delirious Snape hanging from the back of a concerned moose.

Even Dumbledore has nothing to say for a few moments.

"Thank you for bringing our dear friend home," he says gravely to the moose, who nods. "I will send for our gamekeeper to see that you are fed and housed for the night, should you wish." Albus looses my bonds with a movement of his wand, which he uses to lower me gently to the ground.

"How is he?" I whisper, feeling the familiar stones under my back and people gathering to stare.

"He, like everyone else, is under the impression that you have been on an assignment somewhere in the Carpathians," the wizard says in a voice that only reaches my ears. "We'll just say you were waylaid by brigands on your return."

As he floats me along the hallway towards the infirmary, I hear a mouse say to another, "Snape's back!"

"The strangest thing has happened," I murmur to the wizard whose face is at eye level a few feet away.

"Yes?" he says, navigating us up a staircase.

For a moment I like nothing better in the world than the way Albus' face is prepared for absolutely anything I am about to say.

"I seem to have learned how to understand animals' speech. I've never had so many friends in my life." A spider giggles at me from a web.

"Perhaps you can teach an extra class," Dumbledore muses. "It's a most useful skill."

Then we are at the infirmary. Pomfrey takes one look and has Dr. Floyd floo in so they can haul the life back into my body from where it's dangling by a thread. From where I lie, exhausted and weak, everyone seems to be making a big fuss about nothing. But apparently it's bad enough that even the nurse who hates me doesn't care to see me jaundiced and shaking, trying to put an IV in one of the veins of my hand because there's no one else to do it.

Floyd supervises my repeated dunkings in various solutions to loosen the dirt and reverse frostbite. When it is done, Pomfrey gives me some awful look and I realize I haven't complained at all.

When they come at me with the shears and the Capillar-Comb, however, I do speak for the first time since entering the ward. "You will not," and I shield weakly.

"There's no way to save it," she protests. "You'll never get the knots out. And why does a man need hair down to his knees?"

I set my jaw stubbornly and the subject is dropped until Albus comes later that night. "Perhaps a trim," he suggests and I let him cut until it's just below my shoulders, and then I will spend the next few days loosening the remaining knots.

When everyone has finally stopped fussing over me, I lie back and scarcely dare to hope. The different colors of magic are all fluttering safely behind the glass that is the network of wards, and I can sense immediately where the purple-pink color is, but I just drift off to sleep knowing it's there. In the middle of the night, I sense him taking stock of my most recent memories and then surveying my current calm state. "I'm glad you came back."

Harry's energy leads me from my sleeping form to his, and he lets me look through his memories. Everything has been amazingly normal at Hogwarts, and for him. They've had Pomfrey teaching some of the younger potions classes and I'm gratified to note that some students actually prefer my instruction.

"I'm glad you've been well," I say, slightly hurt that he felt my absence not at all.

"I've had a lot of time to think," he begins, and my heart clenches. "It wouldn't do for anyone to know I was concerned." His purple flutters at me. "Or why I wasn't concerned."

It's becoming harder and harder to think of Harry as just a teenager. "How very Slytherin of you," I try to make light. "What other devious plans have you been pursuing that would make me proud?"

His awareness takes mine to a different part of his mind. "I've been in the restricted section of the library," he whispers, and I reassure myself that Bigham's Book has been destroyed. "I wanted to learn more about—me."

"That is quite right for your age," I say stiffly. "I can recommend some books that might help you learn about sexual preference and the many different paths you can choose for finding a suitable partner."

He is flipping through a book, animated line drawings of various predilections. Rose-Croix! They have that in the Hogwarts library? He looks at everything he can find and feels unbearably aroused in general, without knowing where he is most drawn. Then he finds another book shoved behind the others.

Young Harry Potter has some Incongruencies of his own.

"You like this?" I say, careful to keep any judgment from my mind. His purple is thick around me.

"I think there are a lot of things I might like."

"No sex until you've graduated," I say. Since when did we set a date for his deflowering on his graduation?

"What is considered 'sex,' exactly?" he asks cunningly and again I think he was Sorted into the wrong house.

"Forgive me for my vagueness on the finer points of Wizard sexual statutes," I respond. "I suppose it means any sort of genital contact. But you still mustn't touch me at all."

"Fine," comes his voice one last time and then the purple light winks out.

It takes a few more days for a thin, yellow and sickly Severus Snape—minus a few feet of hair—to appear at dinner in the Great Hall. They all look as a house elf takes my order for a medicinal broth of my own devising. With a nod I accept the thimble of Honeymeade Minerva passes me so that I can moisten my dry lips. While I nod politely to everyone's good wishes for my health, I feel the long, sad train of my fate rustling about me, and I am grateful. They think I was set upon by marauders. They think I was poisoned by some fungus sold by an unscrupulous mushroom merchant. They are wiling to believe anything about my bad luck, and not one of them even considers that I've been falling off the edges of madness and into life again.

Albus takes his place at the head of the table and my steaming bowl arrives. It's woodsy and dark like the leaves I was sleeping in not so long ago. I can feel him doing his own version of checking the magic around the table. My old friend would have made a stupendous disciple of Paracelsus.

My senses are so much clearer than they have been in years, and I don't know if he's let down some of the wards or it was the brush with death or if it's Harry sitting far at the end of the Gryffindoor table. His purple heat flutters at my mind for a moment but I keep sipping my soup and assume he is doing the same.

Everyone has pudding and Albus orders a rare Gamla Fruit for me to aid with my recovery. A burst of light explodes when I slice into it and the wizard smiles at me fondly. "Better days," Severus," he says as I chase the delicious juice from the corners of my mouth. It must be the fact that it's the first solid food I've had in ages, because it tastes so good.

Just like when I first started using stolen magic to fuel my humanitarian studies, I am aware that no one knows I am hiding anything. This time I don't think I will get away with what I'm doing without paying some awful price, but I turn up the cup in front of my mouth to drink the last of the precious juice and swallow it as the taste of my new fate.


	27. Chapter 27

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 27: Formation

Harry doesn't come to me that night, or if he does, I'm sleeping too deeply to notice. I return to my classes and listen with barely hidden amusement to all the complaints about Pomfrey's teaching methods and the injustices suffered at her hands. Sometimes I've wondered if my students take anything away from my classes other than a healthy hatred for authority.

I listen to their rebellion against all the tables and charts and other burdensome protocols Pomfrey tried to impose and think at the very least we can all agree that potions are supposed to be a little unpredictable. "We have now established that this is indeed Second-year Potions Instruction, and not a cookery class. Please apply yourselves to removing the wings from the Dayflies you see before you."

My day is going very well until the second to last period, when Potter's class comes in. There is absolutely nothing different about his manner, and I keep my face impassive. All of our mental conversations were some sort of trick played by my mind addled by drugs and lack of food, which my mind has been continuing on its own since I returned, so desperate am I for companionship.

His mind shows me some other things he'd found at the library. Par la Rose-Croix! I need to do something about the amount of smut that's made its way into the stacks.

Suddenly weak in the knees, I sit on my bench and watch the class macerating and decocting without seeing them. All I can see is the animated wizard-pictures Harry has left me with.

I can't even blame myself for the act it depicts because it's something I've never done nor even thought of doing.

The noise of senior-level students brings me back to reality. Potter is giggling with his friends, his hair forming into a cowlick, as innocent as you please.

This young man will make an excellent spy, I think while I push, pull, and smite the image somewhere safe for further inspection after my students have left. The next period is excruciating and my Slytherins gang up on anyone who seems to be taxing my energy too much. They must think I'm exhausted on my first day back.

But in reality, far from being drained, my body and mind threaten to explode if I move too suddenly. It's good to feel something, anything, after all these years of monotonous darkness, but why this?

I have dinner in my rooms because it actually has been a long day, but I also want to search in my own memory. Have I ever looked at pornography? There was Bigham's Book, of course, but those images ranged from the alarming to the repugnant; none of it was appealing. The sex act for me has layers of wrongness shot all through it, but it is so bound up in magic for me I don't think about visual titillation. It would have been like Miss Bundle getting hung up on an especially nice binding on a book—she dismissed all considerations and plunged straight into the knowledge that was her drug. And then I try so hard not to think about wanting someone that when I'm all set to wank in the forest all I can do is think about actual people I've wanted.

Have I ever wanted to be dominated? It's not unusual for one Incongruency to be related to another, but even when Sirius and James introduced some darker aspects and other people into our relationship, it never felt like my thing.

Seen through Harry's very surprising perspective, I identify with one particular pole of the scenario as things go on. Things that do not, strictly speaking, involve genital contact.

Will he be able to do this without falling prey to my True Face? Nobody has ever been able to tell me much about this angelic sliver that has stubbornly rejected the muck of my life, so it could very well be accessible through my mind. This idea terrifies me and so I take a potion that has proven useless in the long term, as have all attempts to definitively negate my sexuality. I fall into an exhausted slumber. And my mind picks up its train of thought.

We don't know if it's a posture that I take or my face itself, or something excreted by my skin, or perhaps something my two hands do as a bit of wandless magic. No one knows precisely what causes someone to meld with a memory on the screen of Severus Snape.

He can put a bag over my head and immobilize me with Petrificus, my mind says, trying to un-knot this problem and find a way for us to be together.

At some point in the night I feel Harry looking through my memories, and then he draws me to himself so I can watch again the images he sent me earlier that day.

The potion turns these images—as it will all sexual thoughts—into a senseless blur, and I sleep.

The next few days show how much of my strength I left in the woods. "Page two hundred and twenty-six," I speak once at the beginning of the lesson, and then watch the class muddle their way through the signaled recipe, content that I can stay upright in my chair. Perhaps I should lash myself to the seat with vines, my fuzzy mind wanders…

It must be that the students are no longer afraid of this quiet, slow-moving Snape, because soon they break out of the hush caused by my shockingly gaunt face (so I am told) and begin to cut capers right before my eyes.

In class one day Potter and his best mate Weasley are the subject of some desultory teasing by my Slytherins, who keep wafting Flame-Flux onto their fire so that the potion alternately scalds and then goes cold. Normally I would be bored by this house rivalry, but I remember his defiance when he first met me. He pegged me as a heartless bastard and started establishing his own power by ignoring me.

It takes but a movement of my two hands that looks like I'm straightening my robe. The flame burns steadily and the students of my house soon turn their sport on others. The effort tires me, but in a good way.

At dinner that evening I sense a bit of disquiet at the purple end of the table (as I think of it now). In the act of reaching for the bread I reach out with my mind to investigate, worming in between the matrix of magic so that not Dumbledore or even Harry knows what I am doing.

Harry's owl is sick and he suspects it is not happenstance. Later I go up to the owlery and after greeting all the other gossiping fowl listen to Hedwig's tale of eating a sweetmeat offered her by a student I recognize from my own house. Returning with a sachet of a few herbs, I recommend rest and no water until she has pecked up all the contents over the next few hours.

The sheer number of birds chattering is a little overwhelming. Taking a deserted corridor back to my chambers a rat looks up from itching at his leg. "Penny for your thoughts?" he says.

I shake my head. "I think I'm paranoid."

He laughs at me. "Either suspect everyone or live in blissful ignorance."

"I've never been one to do things halfway."

Minerva rustles by and frowns at me talking to the animal.

Straightening, I nod at her as she passes.

How much teasing is normal? I wonder as I'm going to sleep. Harry doesn't come to me that night, or the next or the next. It is not difficult to find relief in this, in the idea that perhaps he is turning his attention to his studies or a student his age. I can see him at mealtimes and at class, but he seems to be distracted by pranks that happen regularly in my sight, or still in the grips of annoyance caused by ones that must have been played in the intervals between classes.

It's as though my house has decided of one mind to push Harry Potter to the breaking point. He can scarcely take a step without stumbling. His textbooks' words jumble together while they're closed so that they're senseless collections of letters the next time he opens them. The lenses of his spectacles become Ghastly Glass that makes everyone look hideous. His food leaps off his plate into his lap and his quills will only write obscenities.

At the end of a dinner at which his cutlery bends into a useless rubber whenever he tries to eat, I follow Albus out of the Great Hall. "A word," I say and we go to his rooms. "As I have told you, Mr. Potter advanced in his exercises with me so quickly that I didn't feel he needed them any more."

"Then what does he need, Severus?" he asks in that way of his that could mean anything.

"He needs formation. The students in my house—I'll speak to them about all these pranks, but I can't be there at all times and he needs to strengthen his magic so that they can't trip up his every step."

"What are you suggesting?" he asks. "Do you want me to adjust the wards?"

"It's very simple. We'll work on his shielding against harmless objects—a paper dragon, a soft ball, and if he catches on, at most a leather ball."

Albus smiles. "Yes, I seem to recall someone once pointing out that our wizard course of instruction was alarmingly short on basic defensive and offensive skills." I merely smile back at the allusion to Lilly that cuts me like one of her daggers. "Of course, if you think it will help, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather be assured knows how to defend himself. One of the old dueling rooms will be readied for you and I will tell Potter why he will benefit from the practice. Unless you'd rather."

"Perhaps he'd rather hear it from you. I need to talk to the students of my house."

My Slytherin all deny having some master plan for making Potter's life miserable, though they don't seem too disturbed by the idea that they might be doing so. They're natural liars to a one, so I didn't expect to gain any information so much as impart it. This should be a warning to them that things have gone a little too far.

They always treat me with respect but seem to sense that I am not as invested in the Slytherin tradition as some of their parents. I can think of no better cautionary tale for them than my wreck of a life, but somehow when I berate them for wasting their talents on childish games and exhort them to focus on unspecified "grander goals," most of them take for granted this means Voldemort's mission to undermine the muggle world.

The assaults on Harry continue, however, and I have to restrain myself from taking obvious measures to shield the Potter boy. That would be bad for his sense of independence and do nothing for his reputation, either.

_Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,_

_Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not._

_Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments_

_Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices_

_That, if I then had waked after long sleep,_

_Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,_

_The clouds methought would open and show riches_

_Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,_

_I cried to dream again._

_Caliban's speech, The Tempest, Act III, Scene 1_

Thursday comes and I have long moments to compose my face while his purple energy comes down the hall.

"Do you know why you are here, Mr. Potter?" I ask as he puts down his satchel and joins me in the middle of a barren room. He looks resigned.

"The Headmaster said you could help me with some of my problems," he says without meeting my eyes. The openness of the statement unnerves me for a moment.

"We will be focusing on one of your many problems, if you don't mind," I say brusquely. "It has not escaped our attention that you have had a lot to defend yourself against recently," he shoots me a look holding me responsible for the behavior of my house and I scowl back at him for thinking I would condone it. "And if these incidents are being thoroughly investigated," he sniffs, "you should also take this as an opportunity to improve your skills."

"I'm not going to sink to the level of a Slytherin," he says dully and then stands up straighter as he realizes he's probably insulted me.

"This is precisely the problem, Potter," I snap. "You are far too focused on your opponents and not at all focused on yourself."

A rain of cloth balls starts pelting him from all sides. "What are you doing? You're pathetic, getting your kicks from taunting a student!" he cries, holding his hands in front of his face. "I don't deserve this! I'm leaving!" I hold him in place with my magic but the barrage hits a little less hard and I let him notice the difference before I stop pelting him.

"And what have you observed?" I ask while he examines the soft objects lying around him.

"That you didn't have to use your wand," he says, and I realize I forgot to.

"That was necessary for the surprise factor," I shrug. "Part of the enchantment. But at what point did you feel the assault change?"

"When I started focusing on myself," he says. "Can I learn how to set these on the Slytherin table at dinner?"

With a sigh I pelt him with projectiles, this time a little harder. I don't respond to any of his pleas or insults, simply standing over him while the balls strike him again and again until I fear he will be bruised. He stops begging and insulting my house and just lays there in a knot while I slow the rain of cloth objects until it is just one, striking against his back over and over. He registers this as an improvement until the steady thud against the same spot becomes intolerable. He looks up at me with pure hatred and catches the ball in midair.

"Why did it take you so long to do something even a muggle child on a playground would try to do?" I ask quietly. "What you just did was not magic."

He opens his mouth and closes it. He is embarrassed. "What do you know about muggle fights?" he sulks. "I've seen the way Slytherins do. They don't even get their hands dirty—they just hex you into hurting yourself."

I try to remember if he's gone through any of my memories of my first taunt-filled year at Hogwarts, but it may be that many of the incidents were people laughing at me making a fool of myself without help.

"You may never understand your opponent, Potter," I say softly, "but that does not leave you without recourse." The cloth objects start hitting him again and his patience is worn thin. He tries to throw them back at me as fast as he can, but the assault multiplies and I can block them with only a tiny flexing of my shield.

"Better, but you can see it is not good enough."

"How do you do that?" he pants, holding one arm in front of his face while the other throws the balls at me.

"A good question, but still not quite to the point." The balls stop striking him. "Go on. Throw as hard as you're able." Ruefully I see him enjoying launching the projectiles at me, but of course none of them get anywhere near the professor he's doubtless been wanting to throw a few things at for years.

"Enjoying your catharsis?" I smile, but he doesn't know the word and doesn't seem to care. I turn the cloth balls into one ball, harder, made of leather, and throw it at him. He catches it and seems to wait for praise.

"This is not a snitch; the fight is not over so soon." The ball follows him like a bludger. He runs from it and when he occasionally catches it he only manages to throw it at himself.

"You sick bastard, you're getting off on this aren't you? I'm nothing like you! I don't want to ever be anything like you!" And he grasps the ball and throws it at me. It gets within a foot of me only because I am a little stung by the insinuation that I might be an Incongruent who enjoys abusing him.

He looks at me and his fury dissolves quickly into triumph. "I almost broke your shield!"

"Congratulations, Mr. Potter," I murmur. "It must be quite a heady sensation to have nearly killed your hated professor by getting a foot away from him with a bit of leather."

The irony is lost on him because he is looking for something to throw at me. Finding nothing, he takes his shoe and hurls it at me. It bounces off the shield and hits him in the nose.

"Until next Thursday, Potter," I say, leaving my handkerchief next to him to sop up the blood running from his nose.

At breakfast the next morning the rumor has it that I hexed Potter's shoe so that it would attack him.

My Thursday lessons make me even more unpopular at Hogwarts, and the boy takes his share of beatings, but it's not my fault that he's a seething mass of anger and self-hatred. He can't seem to take a step against me without tripping over himself. It's all I can do sometimes to watch him tangled in his own anger and resignation. Dumbledore is as concerned as I am that the boy can't seem to grasp the difference between himself, his strengths and weaknesses, and those of his opponent.

"Things have been much worse for him at home than I'd realized," Albus says during one of our conversations after Harry has beaten himself nearly senseless while sure I was the one doing it. "You were right to initiate these lessons. Perhaps I was foolish in thinking it would be an immediate loosing of a repressed talent as it was for his mother."

"I've been telling you for years, Dumbledore. Take it from someone who knows—this boy, this young man is not a function of his parents, rest both of their souls. If someone were to actually try to learn who he is instead of assuming he's this Boy Who Lived character the Daily Prophet made up to sell papers, perhaps he would have discovered his unique talents by now and defeated the Dark Lord." Panting a little from the force of this speech, I realize I'm glowering at my old friend and lower my head.

"It's all right, Severus. As usual, you are many steps advanced on the road to truth. Let us try to follow Mr. Potter's needs instead of the opposite for a change."

"He did so well at Legilimency that I am very surprised he's struggling to this extent. I hesitate to imagine these weaknesses being used against him in combat."

"When was the last time you were Called?" the Headmaster asks suddenly. We both know it's been two months since I left and returned.

I roll up my sleeve to show him the Mark as black as ever. For the rest of my life my left arm will always feel like a surprise when I see it there-some part of my brain thinks I really did leave it on a pile of leaves in the forest. "He must have lost interest in me in favor of his new weapon, Harry. Which is why we must make him as strong as we can."

Dumbledore nods. "Carry on, then. I'll try to minimize the damage to your reputation for being hard on the boy."

I go to my chamber for my nightly assault in which Harry makes good on everything I have done to him in practice, although the weapons he uses against me are not made of cloth.

The potion I've begun to take habitually keeps the images blurry, but I do know he doesn't touch me, ever, in these dreams.

How I feel about that stays mercifully blurry as well.

Every once in awhile a strong image will break through clearly.

My hair is loose and pooling around my shoulders. He carefully gathers it up and yanks my head backwards. "Look at yourself." From that uncomfortable position I can see as much of myself as is possible without the benefit of a reflection. "You're a whore."

What can one say to such a statement? So I say nothing, merely registering the new note his voice takes. "You know what that means."

Actually I don't.

He shoves an image into my mind that stands out in sharp relief to the muddy backdrop.

"Do this thing, not because I wish it but because you wish it."

With my liver still far from optimal health from my brush with death and one-week diet of only the strongest intoxicants, I take the modified version of Dreamless Sleep that is milder on the liver as a way to finally escape these dreams, which have taken on a sharpness greater than my fuzzy, warded waking life. Several days of this potion leave me groggy half the time, but the canker has already begun to gnaw at me.

Using my friends among the owls, I ask one to convey my order to an infamous establishment and return with my purchase shrunken into an innocent-looking package tied to her leg. Acceptance of this comes easily as I have accepted so much before now. After all, it's only fair that I suffer some discomfort while he's tangling himself up in his own anger and outrage in our lessons, I think as I set up for another class.

Potter comes in with his jaw set and looks at me defiantly but says nothing. Does he know? Does he know I followed his instructions? We have agreed that we will only discuss these things at night because otherwise it might attract Dumbledore's attention. How can I let him know?

This chronically sullen student has taken to bringing things to throw at me, and this time he shatters a glass and tries to utter an incantation to break my shield. It's all I can do sometimes to protect him from doing grievous harm to himself. I let just one piece in and it skitters to my foot. "Mr. Potter," I say hoarsely and bend stiffly to pick it up between two fingers. I straighten just as slowly while maintaining eye contact. His eyes are hard and he must know that I am wearing the corset under my robes.

He takes advantage of my distraction to make the shard within my fingers jump towards my face. "I'm going to tell everyone what you like to do. That you love being in this position." My hand closes on the glass and it cuts me.

"Congratulations. Your first blood," I whisper and some balance of power shifts between us.

It may slow me down during the day, but at night, my anti-dream potion isn't nearly as good as Dreamless Sleep. The nightly assaults get much more engrossing as Harry's attention turns to objects that not even the strongest anti-sensual potions will turn to a blur. All I will see is a stocking standing out from this cloud of amorphous longing. This old-fashioned stocking with a seam up the back recurs, it takes on all the nuance and passion that is blurred out by the potion which is apparently best at suppressing carnal, rather than symbolic, stimulants. The nylon snakes into my dream and lays there, a suggestive squiggle that becomes the shorthand for everything I don't want to understand but can't help wanting to know deeper about this dream space.

Harry Petrifies me while centipedes with their feet dipped in aphrodisiac powder run across my skin. He is a genius in humiliation and I have never felt so thoroughly taken care of in all my life.

No one has ever taken this much time to show me what I didn't even realize I wanted, even if he is often focusing on the most unpleasant desires. I sit there in class, and later in our lesson, in the sure leather embrace of our secret dream activities as if nothing is happening. The Potter boy looks at me with ill-disguised disdain. For some reason I can only count up to eighteen anymore.

"Has he learned to block at all?" Dumbledore asks over my tea and his cocoa.

"For a moment or two, but he seems to enjoy attacking my defenses a little too much," I state with careful neutrality. At this very moment my body is being slowly separated from itself under the effects of Harry's imagination and it is the simplest thing in the world to conceal from my good friend. After all, it's not against the law. And I am doing nothing to Harry. He is doing it all to me—without touching me. I can't even see what he imagines he's doing to me.

But, par le Trismegiste, I can feel every bit of the emotion.

"Harry seems to succeed from time to time," Dumbledore points to a scratch on my cheek.

"Merely lost focus for a second," I say, thinking of my changed movement when I stretched to block a projectile. "It's a far cry from the potions laboratory."

"Speaking of which," he says. "Do you remember the last potion that you gave Harry for his nightmares? Because he hasn't been complaining of any for months, and I'm wondering what the operative ingredient was."

This startles me for a second. "I'm not sure. Let me consult my notes." This reminds me of something I had meant to mention. "Perhaps there's something I can give him to build up his natural defenses. Mr. Potter has sadly focused so much of his energy on offense that he has this complete rejection of defense." And I get up very naturally with my normal good posture, the accoutrements of the student in question's tastes clamoring at my senses.

In truth, I have been letting these little accidents happen more and more. I want to feel something touch me, even if it's only a blunted dagger he's launched at me. I like having these little token injuries to carry with me—for the few minutes before they heal themselves—so that contact is not just an exercise in our dreams.

Sometimes Potter steps forward to see what kind of damage he has done, and I feel him right at the edge of my shield, hot and purple and pink, flushed with the awareness that he has hurt me in some small way. Sometimes I forget that the purpose is to teach him shielding because it has become an exercise in how much proximity I can allow myself and what type of trophy we will both walk away from. The scratch on the cheek Dumbledore glimpsed after a lesson is the most public I have allowed myself. It could have been large gash for all anyone cared—the public opinion has sided firmly with Harry Potter, who must be finally getting the better of his lessons with that bastard, Severus Snape.

This suggestion of Dumbledore's about potions seems like a good excuse to take a break from the unbearable tension of our lessons. "Where are we going?" Harry asks suspiciously when I tell him we will be using our lesson time for another purpose. He snorts when I stand ramrod-straight and let him walk first into my private laboratory. "Think you can poison me into giving up?" he gibes. "I'm not going to just lie there and take it from you, no matter what dirty tricks you stoop to."

Impassively, I steel myself for the onslaught of taunts that will come my way this evening in our dreams.

"I remind you again to know your self before your enemy, Potter. This is merely a diagnostic to see if there are ways I can make you stronger."

My records show that Harry has not had any Dreamless Sleep or any other potion of the kind for some time, but once the idea cropped up I've been very concerned that there is something undermining the boy's strength, and thus contributing to his poor showing in lessons and continuing teasing problem.

He sits down on the stool I indicate and watches curiously while I busy myself readying the various diagnostic materials. "Pomfrey doesn't use all this."

"Pomfrey has neither the interest nor the background to grasp this technique," I say, wondering where this science would be if none of the tragedy in my life had derailed it. This particular technique came to me years ago but without Lessmore to either act as my guinea pig or send patients my way, I've only used it on myself, Dumbledore, and the occasional student roped in as a volunteer.

"Hold this clay pot in your left hand, and this other in your right." I pour two different powders into the neutral solutions and watch them change colors, bubble, and otherwise react to the different reagents I add. I then alternate with him holding his wand in one hand and a pot in the other.

"This is wicked," Harry says, noticing the different surges of power that the potions cause in either arm. "What does it say about me?"

I keep my eyes on my notes as the two pots fizzle out with the last neutralizing agent. "It says that you are suffering from Galvanizing Anemia and a few other wasting ailments and it's a miracle you're walking around."

My neutral tone keeps the sense of the words from hitting him for a moment. "What? Why don't I feel bad?"

"Galvanizing anemia has the misfortune of making a person feel rather good until the advanced stages," I exlain and put a book in front of him while I make calculations and consult some of my old notes. It seems ages since Lessmore and I began our study and almost as long since I've corresponded with her. My plan was to owl her after performing the diagnostic; it's always better to go in with an unbiased eye. But I shut the book with a snap and push Potter with the edge of my cloak. "Pomfrey," I say and he obeys without protest, still a little shaken by the picture I showed him.

"Are you capable of sparing another person's feelings?" the nurse bursts at me when she learns that the patient not only knows his diagnosis, but knows that it can cause the internal organs to bunch up at the surface of the skin.

"Whatever for?" I say mildly, and Harry shoots me a look that I think is conspiratorial.

Dr. Floyd is flood in and he talks excitedly to everyone at once about this rare and serious disorder he seldom gets a chance to treat.

"I trust the doctor plans upon treating this particular manifestation at some point," I drawl. Harry looks away to hide a smile.

The doctor casts the diagnostic trident and then builds a small city of charms to reveal the circuit of the illness at work. Harry's kidneys are functioning at less than half capacity and his immune system is seriously weakened. Even a cold could be very serious indeed.

The three of us say nothing and Harry assumes this is the bad sign it is.

The various recommended protocols are put in place: all of his food must be rigorously neutral, and here both practitioners step back in admiration as I effortlessly test some batches of potatoes and broth and herbal tea, setting aside the ones that will be used for his next day's meals. They start him on a few potions we have in store and I take Floyd's orders for a few more.

"Am I going to be all right?" Harry asks me and no one else. I file the moment away as one of my best.

"Time will tell," I say. "You'll be getting Dreamless Sleep for the time being to make sure you actually rest."

Of course this means a heartbreaking separation for me, but I don't care. How could I have let someone I care about waste away before my very eyes and not notice?

I throw myself into my laboratory assignments over the next few nights, unable to sleep and seriously considering whether I should take off the corset as a symbol of shedding all these dangerous games. But I couldn't if I tried. Harry has the password and no other. It was set during our dreams one night and somehow he's stolen back the memory of the word so I can't open it myself. Every time I think of Harry's internal organs swimming up to the surface I am glad for the pressure holding me together.

"You have done a great good, Severus," Dumbledore says the next night, looking over Harry sleeping peacefully.

"No, Albus, if you hadn't asked me about the lack of nightmares none of this would have even occurred to me."

"As Dr. Floyd keeps pointing out, this is a most unusual disorder," the headmaster says, and we share a look about the man's clear intent to publish an article about it, "but I, for one, am most interested in how Harry contracted it."

I carefully avoid Albus' eyes, full of guilt at how our nighttime wanderings must have taxed the boy's system when he needed his strength the most. "I think it all boils down to one possibility," I say.

"Indeed. Direct skin-to-skin contact is the most usual," he says, and for once I am completely off the suspect list.

Pomfrey approaches and it is clear she can't think of a reason to blame me either. "He's taking his nutrition from his food very well," she says by way of thanks for my potions and supervision of his diet. "This is my worst nightmare. A patient who looks so well and is really very ill. I've passed him in the hall a dozen times…"

"And I teach him almost daily," I say quietly. The three of us watch him sleep and Dumbledore looks at the two of us shrewdly. "How difficult would it be for the two of you to devise some sort of screening tool for who has been exposed to Galvanizing Anemia?"

The woman and I look at each other, our talents united for a change. The nurse and I confer for several hours and come up with a way to test everyone without their knowledge. Pomfrey turns out to have no qualms about the subterfuge, but she does frown when I refuse to bring in Floyd.

"We don't know who he talks to and he doesn't seem to be very circumspect about his professional achievements. Let's just concentrate on the Hogwarts community. Eliminating several hundred people would be a start." I enlist some of my new animal friends around the castle and packets of a certain kind of salt are distributed around the dormitories and classrooms, then carefully gnawed open by the rodents.

Dumbledore has to ask the castle to secrete a bit of extra moisture because it still dislikes me, and thus the salt seeps into the surfaces everyone touches everyday. Harry has been well enough to attend classes almost the whole time, but he eats only food that has been inspected and balanced by me and then only under the baleful eye of a house elf who hates me meddling with his domain.

Potter wanders down to my laboratory unannounced and nearly scares the life out of me. I've been concentrating too much to sense his presence. He's one of the few people that knows where it is, and one of the even fewer who isn't warded to stop at the doorstep.

"Come for your dose of hard truths," I state, shuffling through some old books to hide my upset.

"Maybe," he says, settling on the stool that is apparently now "his stool" in both our minds. "I was wondering if we could try a lesson again."

I'm glad of the corset holding me together because I am split in two by this suggestion. I miss his tantalizing closeness, his emotions hot on me—but "I could have killed you by stretching you scarce resources to the limit the way I did," I say and fetch a dish for a Gamla fruit I've been saving up.

"I see that now," Potter says, "but I wonder if it would be easier for me to block now that my system is getting back to normal."

"I don't know," I say and toss the fruit at his head. It stops just before his hand can catch it, and then bounces into his open palm.

We smile at each other at the long-delayed progress. My student accepts the dish and a knife and fork and places everything on the worktable in front of him.

"I've been very angry at you, professor. It's easy to be." He looks down at the fruit and poises the knife on the mottled skin. "And this whole time the problem has been with me. I was sick and blaming you did nothing to solve the problem. I—should have told you how mixed up I've been feeling, knowing something wasn't right. If I'd trusted you maybe you would have diagnosed me earlier. I hope we can still continue my lessons—I am really confused half the time and I do a brilliant job of hiding it. Or so I thought. And I hope we can be—on the same side," he adds as an afterthought to this long speech, very long for him during waking hours.

A burst of light illuminates his face from the fruit.

He slices off a bit and offers it carefully on the tip of the knife.

The sweet taste of my fate makes my tongue leap in my mouth.

It's obvious that Harry's subconscious has been weakened by something, whether as cause or effect of the illness we can't tell. Still taking my potion every night, I sink into clouds instead of dreams, but they are thick with guilt that I somehow contributed to my student's illness.

Harry is on his own modified Dreamless Sleep for the indefinite future, but I force any thoughts about missing our nightly memory-trading from my mind. There are castle defenses to build up—Pomfrey, for all her faults, is not a bad asset when it comes to preparing for biological warfare, which is what we all think Harry's illness must be the first stage of. The nurse thinks of a dozen ways the castle can be infiltrated that didn't even occur to me, and Albus can't stop laughing at how well I am cooperating with my enemy.

There are my regular classes to teach, reconnaissance with the castle animals to organize, closer surveillance on my own house, extra potions to make, and then there are Harry's lessons, which resume in a new routine.

Now that he's not angry with me it's easier for me to put my feelings aside and explore his reactions to the various exercises. We try to isolate the second when his magical aura registers the projectile, which we now vary from large to small and often use in conjunction with blindfolds. Dumbledore comes by one day and watches as I bowl a soft ball and Harry tries to bat it with a cricket bat. He hits it sometimes and makes a crow of triumph.

"Very impressive," Albus says. Harry flushes with pleasure while I loose the blindfold with my magic.

"I'm beginning to understand," Potter tells the headmaster. "Everything Professor Snape was saying just didn't register for so long, but he's right. If you don't know yourself and listen to your senses, you're going to be hopeless with your enemy."

I can feel the swell of pride flickering in each of our chests for different reasons. Only then do I feel the corset pressing against me for the first time in some while. It's a magical device designed to produce a steady tightening, which I haven't felt in weeks it's become so normal to me. Maybe Harry isn't Incongruent at all and I was just poisoning his mind with smut, comes the terrible thought.

Then Dumbledore leaves and we go back to the exercise. With the blindfold safely on him I can look at this young man, only a few months away from eighteen, and I'm happy to be able to help him in a way everyone wants—by listening. It's even more meaningful to share a little banter at the end of a lesson and give him praise that flushes his face.

This is the way it's supposed to be, I tell myself. He needs a mentor. I need an able student.

No one has to know what I wear under my robe.


	28. Chapter 28

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 28: Student Events

A couple of months go by, and I wish they had lasted longer. We enter spring with no one having appeared with a reaction from the salt mixture we've distributed around the castle. The mice and rats enlisted to watch Slytherin house haven't noticed anything especially suspicious among this perpetually suspicious house, though their ability to understand people other than the select few like me makes their intelligence somewhat limited in this regard.

Harry and I have lessons twice a week now. Once in blocking, and once for what we call "Pick your poison." We flip a coin to see who gets to choose that time and then he—or I, whoever wins the toss—can select any subject to explore for that evening.

It sounded too dangerous when the practice arose out of a small wager, but Potter seems to sense what a privilege it is to be able to ask anything and get a detailed, honest answer. So we've talked about what an Animated lichen eats and what's the real difference between muggles and the magically inclined (I don't know but we have a healthy debate about it), about who actually keeps track of all the points exchanged between houses, and what happens when you die.

Usually my topics tend towards potions and other survival techniques, which he actually takes notes on sometimes.

This particular Tuesday the student wins the toss and sits back smugly for a moment. "I want to know more about you," Harry says.

"You know everything there is to know," I stammer. "I'm just Severus Snape, all-around bastard of occasional utility."

"I guess what I mean is, I want to know what you think of me."

The leather corset is squeezing on my lungs. "I should think that would be a trivial concern compared to others," I mutter.

"You knew my parents. I want to know what they would think of me," he modifies.

"This aspect of you confuses me," I retort irritably, wishing these inevitable questions could have been put off indefnitely. "You have half the school, most of both genders, in fact, swooning over you, and yet you ask your filthy potions instructor whether your parents would approve of the boy who has gone to battle several times and survived."

"And what I don't understand about you is why you're always down on yourself," he answers in kind. "And it is not true that boys swoon over me," Harry retorts, and then adds, "Girls sometimes act kind of funny, but they're girls."

"Would you care to make a wager, Mr. Potter?" I propose. "I wager you one free lesson where you pick the poison, no limits, if you can honestly tell me in two days' time that a significant number of your male classmates are not unduly interested in you."

"No limits?" he repeats, already planning some awful questions, no doubt. "How will we know who's won?"

"I'll know," I assure the Potter boy and shoo him out the door.

Busy with classes and potion orders, the wager slips my mind until I see Harry in class on Thursday morning. His eyes seek mine once or twice but I can't access his mind or tell in any other way what he's feeling. The class goes the same as always. Not just Harry, but all of Gryffindor, has trouble with their cauldrons smoking and I can see he's too distracted to notice.

That evening my student comes in not dressed for practice. "Are you not well?" I ask, putting down the box of feathers we were going to train with.

He uses his wand to close the door and we sit on two upturned crates in silence for some long minutes. "I see that I won the bet," I venture quietly.

"Guess that means you get to ask me anything," he says, trying to distract from his clearly conflicted feelings.

"That wasn't part of the bargain," I reply gently, and then use a feather to lift up his chin so he will look in my eyes. "I meant no harm, Mr. Potter, I just thought it was important that you realize what a blind spot you have when it comes to others' affection for you."

"Don't you have the same problem?" he says.

"I've not had so much affection to ignore as you," I shoot back, and let him look at me, a decrepit man perched on a box, trying desperately to learn how to be good much too late in the game.

"They look at me in the shower room," he whispers. "I never noticed before. But they do, and some of them hang around at mealtimes and there are those that never miss a move I make in Quidditch." I raise an eyebrow. "They aren't thinking of catching the Snitch."

I laugh before realizing it's inappropriate. "I see you have a lot of questions about these matters, Harry, but it's yet another case of you needing to pay attention to yourself. I can recommend some books…"

To my surprise he is interested. Usually my offers of a book, even something that would appeal to his boyish bloodthirstiness like the classic "Compendium of Hard-to-Cauterize Cuts," fall on deaf ears. Harry is deathly afraid of anyone in the school finding out that he is reading these selections, so I agree to order him some nice, neutral age-appropriate books and have them picked up by Hedwig.

"I think I have a lot harder time than other blokes my age do with talking about it—sex I mean," Potter says with unusual waking-hour candor. "Maybe there's something wrong with me."

I think of all the precocious sexual interest a few months ago and think it's good he's finally integrating dreams with reality to the extent that he can say the word "sex" out loud. "Expect the packages within the next two days and we'll talk next week," I say. "You can talk to me about anything and unless you say something truly dangerous to your well-being I will not tell anyone."

"You're one of the only people I actually believe that about," the young man says, getting up. "What were we going to be doing with the feathers?"

I look down at the feather still between my fingers. "You were to sense if I was tickling you from twenty paces away while blindfolded, and then practice keeping them in the air while performing other tasks. Good to remember that not all weapons are big hunks of steel or bricks."

He smiles but the expression doesn't reach his eyes. "Thank you, professor," he says distantly and walks out.

The books are delivered and I am sick with worry until Tuesday. What if he brings up our dream activities? What if he asks to see the corset? What if he decides he's homosexual and asks me if I am?

The subject of my worry brings two of the books shrunken in his pocket and reconstitutes them within the safety of my laboratory. "I think I like boys and girls," he says without preamble.

The corset hugs me secretly.

"As you read, this is very common," I point out, setting two cups of Heathmore tea in front of us. We both need to be relaxed during this conversation.

"Do you?" he asks just as suddenly and I jump.

"I prefer men," I say with the same intonation with which I offer him the sugar. "But I have loved one woman very deeply."

He nods as if receiving potions instructions. "But you would rather—be with men."

"Yes. and that's something that can really only be determined by experience," I say. "And you should find another young person, boy or girl, that you like and trust before you do that. These early experiences are very important—"

"What's it like, with a man?" he interjects.

My cup rattles on its saucer. "I thought you had questions about yourself, Mr. Potter. What other reactions did you have to your reading?"

"It makes everything seem so—orderly—but I don't feel at all orderly about it," he complains. "I feel—never mind."

"How do you feel?" I prompt.

"Like I'm missing something because I don't have dreams like the other blokes." He admits. "I've been on Dreamless Sleep on and off for most of my time here at Hogwarts. I had some nice dreams awhile back that I couldn't remember very well, but when I woke up I knew that they had been lovely."

The idea that he repressed all of our dealings has occurred to me many times before, but I am deeply ashamed at the evidence that I must have been sharing cloudy but intimate conversations with a part of himself Harry doesn't even seem to own. The corset hugs me reassuringly. "Perhaps we could adjust your dosage," I say with my face toward my shelves. "I hadn't realized that what we were giving you was interfering with such an important physical function."

"Then will I know what sort of things I like?" he asks eagerly.

"You may learn a few things." We spend the rest of the time dispelling his alarmingly faulty understanding of the male and female anatomy.

I tell Albus that night that I plan on giving Harry a different dose of his nightly medicament, citing Harry's complaints that it is too sedating. The headmaster nods, distracted. He's gotten a hold of Dr. Floyd's treatise on the Galvanizing Anemia and he seems to take it as more than the work of a blowhard looking for attention. The doctor himself is unreachable in China.

At the same time, the Ministry of Magic is having some odd cases of sabotage—mostly as a result of poor communication or rivalry among the ranks. His fingers predictably in every pie, Albus is working with the ministry to investigate further.

Guiltily thankful that my sexual education classes are far from the headmaster's mind, I leave word for Harry that our Thursday lesson will also take place in my laboratory. Long before the scheduled time I am there waiting to hear how the new mixture that he took the night before affected his dreams. All I know is, I didn't see him at all.

My hand pushes the cup of calming tea towards him. Harry looks at it and I don't see a boy any longer. His eyes travel up to my face and he studies my face for a long time while I choke on the suspense.

"How long have I wanted you?" he asks.

There is only the sound of our breathing.

"Does it have anything do with when I had that delirium months ago? Where I was obsessed with that woman?" he continues. "I really, really wanted her, so I must like both men and women."

"There are some things about me you will find hard to accept," I begin the explanation I have rehearsed many times. "I myself don't accept them very well."

His face still clouded with his own emotions, Harry must listen to the convoluted tale of what an Alkahest is, why I can't be close to anyone, and how his obsession with the woman was, in fact, a desire for me, but also entirely an illusion.

"How awful for you," Potter says suddenly.

"Yes, it is, but you are a healthy boy who could have anyone he likes. I want to help you accept your nature, whatever that is, Mr. Potter, because no one really helped me growing up and it was so much worse."

He lays his head on his arms. "In my dream, we were—doing things—that didn't involve touching. That won't get you sent to Azkaban, will it?"

I start lecturing him about propriety between teacher and student before falling silent.

"We were doing what exactly?" I ask against my better judgment.

"Are you really wearing it?"

My teacup crashes on the ground. I reach for my wand to scoop up the shards of porcelain.

"Pick it up," Harry says in a new voice.

"What?" I say senselessly. My mind has evaporated between my ears.

"I'll know by how you bend over. You don't have to say anything. Just pick up the cup."

With great dignity, I bend down and carefully place the sharp pieces in one hand, then I straighten up and meet his eyes.

All of the shadowy things we have done in our minds during the night spill hotly into waking life. I'm blushing down to my toes.

"I like knowing that very much," Potter says with an innocence that registers as anything but sincere. "I'd like even better to see you in it."

"Absolutely not," I say, the shards digging into my hand.

"Can I feel it?" he pursues.

I smooth out the robe so he can see the outline of the stiff garment under my waistcoat for one second.

Potter's green eyes are all that I would want to see the moment before death. "See you tonight," he says with a novel kind of assurance and walks out.

When people are settled in for the night I take a small bag and go out into the woods where the wards are not so strong. I settle against a rug and let myself hover near a dreaming state.

He is in me—in my mind. And I can't take responsibility for these wonderful, awful things he suggests, just his voice on top of the blurry backdrop I refuse to give up, because these things would never have occurred to me on my own. There are no secrets here. We never touch, even in our dreams, so great is my fear of bringing the illusions caused by my condition into this rare place of truth. Harry nevertheless begins to map my responses. Every reaction I reward him with is a declaration. A pledge. A promise.

Then I lay there for a long time in the warm spring night, letting my body take the air and take its place in nature, the place it should have always had.

Now that everything it out in the open, things are a little easier in that I can count on Harry's full discretion and help in keeping various worst case scenarios from happening. But it is also harder—harder to teach when my senses are in a riot over the student in the third row. Harder to keep myself bland and predictable at mealtimes. Our lessons, however, are irreproachable. We spend Tuesdays and Thursdays both working on some very advanced shield techniques, now made possible because our bodies are excruciatingly aware of each other.

Dumbledore stops by at the door regularly, as does Minerva and a growing number of students. We now stand at the length of the long practice space, and Harry can occasionally tell me what letter I draw in the air with my wand while he's blindfolded.

A loneliness that had grown deep into my bones continues its steady melt.

With his Hogwarts career coming to an end, I can see that Harry is at a loss. He never expected to live this long. Probably no one else did either, knowing Wizard Society and its normal shelf-life for heroes.

All Harry knows is that he is extravagantly well trained and not sure where the battle is. But no one is so complacent as to think it won't come. Even I couldn't try very hard to convince Harry to think about college with this sense of a new conflict hovering on the horizon. He makes plans to go back to his aunt and uncle's so he can work and save some money until his eighteenth birthday at the end of July leaves him an adult who can rent his own apartment.

We argue about going back to those awful people but he is adamant about facing his old tormentors with his new shielding knowledge. "If I don't prove to myself that I'm stronger than them I'll always be carrying them around with me."

Harry Potter is beautifully mature for his age.

And I am never more proud of him than at the Senior Ball.

The true purpose of these childish revels is for the faculty chaperones to prove their loyalty to their ever-smiling liege, Albus Dumbledore. No one will ever convince me otherwise. The students' little snits and heartbreaks are mere background noise to the heroic efforts of the staff to not openly smite each other with their long-repressed rivalries and hatreds. Everything seems to come undone when they put on their formal robes and confront their students' hysteria, covert romantic liaisons and often nearly lethal attempts to intoxicate themselves.

Teachers become teachers because they can't bear direct contact with people—or at least, almost all Hogwarts professors exhibited some kind of pathology in their persons. Take us outside the comfort of our perches at the front of the class, and most of us quickly wither under strain.

At least, those professors who do not reap the benefits of my expertise in calming potions do wither.

Over the years I have begun providing a service to a select group of staff. An intoxicant keyed to their magical signatures is passed from my hand to theirs on insufferable occasions such as student Balls, assemblies, and the dreaded teacher planning periods over breaks.

Only people who have gotten on my good side are among the fortunate. The rest must fare for themselves at functions where Dumbledore has engineered the wine to have no effect upon the faculty after the first glass. I often see them in the infirmary later, where the potions I administer for nervous conditions are much less pleasurable.

I think of it as a sort of insurance policy—treat me decently throughout the year, and I'll provide my unique form of chemical friendship.

Minerva refused to play by my rules her first two years at Hogwarts.

She's maintained a sort of glacial regard in my direction ever since. All I have to do is raise my eyebrow at one of her catty remarks, and the fear of a sober student function passes across her face like a spasm.

This year the end-of-term dance is different for me in a number of ways.

A new self-confidence has begun to shine out of Harry the last few months. Very gently, very subtly, he projects a new image of himself—no longer on the defensive, no longer a boy, and above all, no longer exclusively heterosexual.

How he did it by never saying a word about it, nor ever getting together with another boy, I will never understand, but somehow, Harry took to heart all of our shielding and integration exercises and started just being himself.

Perhaps no one realized this consciously until the Ball. Harry deliberated about it with me in my laboratory, him discussing the pros and cons and me trying not to influence him one way or the other about asking another young man to the dance.

"It will feel like I'm hiding something if I take a girl," Harry decided at some point. It seems to be a matter between him and his conscience—what the school thinks about it doesn't appear to concern him much.

My young friend's main concern was for his target—Edgar Singh, a boy everyone teased about liking other boys, and whom Harry didn't want to out even on their last day as students.

"Shouldn't it be his own decision to let people know?" Harry asks for the hundredth time.

"And it will be, if you ask him in private and he says yes."

Harry and Edgar are the first same-sex couple in recent memory to attend a Hogwarts dance, and I have to keep smiting myself under my robe for tearing up at how natural they are, and how natural everyone else is in return.

When Albus beams at me I beam back and realize I've forgotten to take my traditional dose of China Cheer Plus.

When school finally comes to an end, I'm hiding my emotions but they don't involve disappointment. Of course I won't be seeing Harry, but we have the nights, once we locate each other on the Dream Floo. We've decided it will make everything easier for us in the future if we wait these almost two months until he's eighteen: although the age of consent is sixteen in both the muggle and magical worlds, we want people to know that we've made a mutual, adult decision to be together.


	29. Chapter 29

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 29: A Canker

From the end of school until his birthday in mid-July, I live for two. This summer I actually take a holiday in France and wish I had done so every summer of my life. It's like coming home without any of the burdens of actual relatives. I do everything I want to do and some things just for Harry so I can show him in our dreams. Together at night we relive museums and cafes and arrogant people with distinguished noses that Harry can't stop laughing at because they look like me, so he says. We plan on taking a holiday there together as soon as we are legally able to travel together, and talk endlessly about the fast-approaching day when that will happen.

Finally the day arrives. Harry has taken a job at a cinema for the time being. Hearing about his new immunity to his relatives convinces me this short time back with them was a good idea. He was going to tell them that the cinema had several back-to-back features, which they did from time to time, and then take two days off from work. If they even noticed that he didn't come home, which wouldn't be likely, the muggles wouldn't have much of a chance to raise a fuss before he came with an excuse that diverted their attention.

We will have some time together—no students, no headmaster, nobody but us.

Harry takes a taxi to the muggle hotel I chose for being not too embarrassingly sleazy. He knocks at the door and I open it from across the room without turning around. I am frightened of dozens of things, but had promised him that I wouldn't ruin the whole night by worrying about something going wrong.

The door shuts and I feel him approach. "Happy birthday," I whisper to the purple-pink magic.

My body finally turns around to face the young man looking at me greenly through spectacles. "Here is your present." I hand him a small box of inlaid wood, hexagonal in shape, with a hinged lid.

He opens it, revealing something that looks like a sugared violet. "I searched all over France for weeks before I found it. They're exceedingly rare." His eyes are confused. "The best known remedy for breaking the intoxication caused by an Alkahest." I smile at the memory I kept from him in our nightly sharing of our days. "There's a very small wizarding village in Brittany that has had a few born there over the centuries. Perhaps they're ancestors."

He sets the box aside and lays a hand on my face. I gasp. "If it takes this for you to see that there is no difference between seeing what I most desire and seeing you, then thank you for the only gift I wanted."

He's unbuttoning my shirt and sliding it off with my jacket. He looks at the corset forcing curves onto a body he thinks of as all lines and flat planes and breathes in deeply. "Take off the rest," he says, watching the rest of me come into pale bloom. His mouth works at saying something, but he says nothing as my nakedness becomes complete. He simply takes off his clothes and then whispers something. The corset opens like a chrysalis.

He separates the black leaves and puts it aside to reveal a small waist he holds delicately in his hands. It looks as though he could snap me in half, but he puts his arms around me and draws me into the heat of his body with its querying penis. I sob. Harry fits his mouth around mine and strokes a body that eagerly soaks up any contact with his skin. I pull away and look into his eyes to see if he's intoxicated, but it's just Harry, this young man who has chosen me and is in the process of claiming me for his own.

"Quickly, tell me five of my faults," I gasp while putting condoms on us.

He looks at me wonderingly and I'm terrified until he begins, "You are an incessant worrywort, you know how to ruin any perfect moment-I can think of nothing I'd like to be doing less right now than taking a test, you could do with several centuries' worth of your own lessons on integration and psychological health, you don't know how to trust, and most of all, the present you gave me has everything to do with your fears, and nothing to do with what I wanted from France, which was a plane ticket there so we could go back together."

He laughs and kisses me with his smile. "Now are you going to shut up?"

My mouth is not free to answer until some hours later.

His own he uses to stimulate my chest in the way that I crave, and I'm too lost to good sense to think why his swallowing that stream of my concentrated magic might be a bad idea even though it felt like perfection. Our bodies are hopelessly tangled; I feel our magics mixing together and it's oceans of purple behind my eyes and in my lungs, under my skin. I'm flying.

All of the reactions Harry has memorized over the months are being put to good use. He's playing my nerves like a harpsichord. I'm flashing like a potion to reveal my true nature and I see purple with silver stars.

My lover draws me by my waist close to him, and kisses me for a long time and then we breathe a while, staring at the ceiling. Finally he rolls over and slaps me lightly on the cheek. "You said you wouldn't worry. Don't you see? I'm perfectly fine. Would you like me to recite the decoction points of the Noble Herbs like you taught us in second year?"

I'm staring at him and he takes my long hair and arranges it over my shoulders. "Say something," he commands. I jump at the tone of his voice. I'd just been wondering if his dominant side was going to show itself tonight, and then wondering if that was bad or not. We'd agreed the first time was to be free of kink.

"I was just speculating on how strictly we were going to interpret the lack of deviance," I murmur shyly. He laughs and gets up and to fetch the corset. "Put it on, slut," he says happily licking at my ear.

When I get out of bed he says in his normal voice, "Severus, I didn't mean it."

Harry stares at the package in his hand. "This was the other present I wasn't sure if I should give you."

He tears off the paper eagerly. His hands drop the contents like a snake.

Now is my turn to apologize. "I remembered seeing this in your mind once and I thought you might like—"

The look he gives me could melt a stone.

The old-fashioned stockings and garter are on in a moment.

He takes me while pulling my hair, yanking on the corset laces occasionally. "How did you survive without this for so long, whore?"

I moan and he summons a whip from his clothes on the floor, apparently a little present to me from him. "Shall I?" He asks like a gentleman and we spend the rest of the time acting out as many fantasies from our shared dreams as we have time for, exploring each other's bodies in between. The room is thick with magic. I think lazily that there will be traces of our signatures for a long time to come.

This Harry Potter that is now completely mine is more of a prize than my poor imagination could have expected. He has a strong chest and well-defined arms from his training. His body hair is already much more abundant than mine. "You have a dancer's body," he tells me while I'm sitting in the curve of his chest, his arms and legs wrapped around me.

"That was another of my grandmother's schemes for me that didn't work out. I'm nimble enough but never let my instructor forget for a second that I wished her dead along with all forms of frivolity," I chuckle. "Are you hungry? Should we go out?"

"Sometimes you are very stupid, Severus," Harry says buried in my hair, his arm around my waist.

"How do you want me?" the words come from my mouth like the first bloom of a flower that will renew itself forever.

"I want you here."

This is not something we've discussed very much. For some reason this makes me much more nervous than anything else. Suddenly my partner is the inexperienced young man he really is, and I am in control.

I want this to be good the way nothing was ever good for me at his age. That I can make Harry forget himself with my touch after all the blackness I've brought to the world—it's a miracle. Right before the crucial moment he levitates the box over and carefully lifts out the flower. "So you know that it's me and it's you," he says and lets the flower dissolve on his tongue.

It happens very slowly, with great discipline to let him decide when the strangeness is over and the goodness begins.

"Oh."

"Yes?"

"Oh!"

"Yes," I lick between his lips. That I have the power to give this pleasure, to lay the way for a lifetime of good intimacy instead of bad, awes me, and I coax him gently. The sounds he is making are simply the best thing I have ever heard. I gather him up in my arms until I have his full weight and he can totally relax into the experience. I have never felt so much apart of another living being. Our mental link, forged over months, makes our physical experience incomparably deep. I feel what he feels, learning to open to someone for the first time. He feels what I feel, my complete agreement with his body.

We order in.

Finally it is time to leave. When we weren't making love, Harry and I have made plans to travel in perhaps a months' time.

Then I can't restrain myself any longer and burst out, "Cast Leviosa."

He sighs.

His wand traces uselessly in the air.

He frowns but apparently the expression on my face is far worse.

"Don't worry, it's temporary, right? I'll be fully recharged by the time I see you again. Maybe I can find an apartment by then. That doesn't take magic, and I have the money."

A knot of worry has appeared in my stomach and I surreptitiously cast a few charms on him. "You'll be all right in that subdivision of yours, I suppose."

We kiss once more and leave separately, me a few minutes after him because I am paying the bill.

I get a peaceful and sated feeling from Harry all day as I go about renting my own rooms for the month I plan on staying in London before we return to France together for the last of summer.

That night I get vague pleasant feelings and a few snatches of annoyances about the cinema job. He must be tired. Me, I won't need to sleep for a couple of days. I lie in bed though, and eat fruits naked, sketching out a new advanced study course in shielding Albus has asked me to teach. I feel Harry's physicality and magic saturating me all the way to the marrow and it is impossible not to feel reborn.

It goes on for a week like this, my idyllic dreams. More. Harry is coming to me every night and working during the day.

I go out to eat at a restaurant and the roast turns black on my tongue.

An hour later I am Called.

"My don't you look lovely," Voldemort says, surveying me up and down. He has my clothes off right away and laughs when he can't spell off the corset. "You have the air of a bride who has just learned the pleasures of the bedchamber." He uses his wand to turn one cheek, then the other for his inspection. "My moon-calf, my Caliban, is more like a Dian, these days." He strokes my hair. "You have bloomed as only a true slattern does under the whip."

My mind is not working properly. There are no marks on me from my encounter with Harry. I stare at him stupidly.

"If it takes this for you to see that there is no difference between seeing what I most desire and seeing you, then thank you for the only gift I wanted," the evil wizard says with Harry's intonation.

And then he's in me. Voldemort is in my mind. Only now I feel the black taste, can discern the black thread that is winding through the last six months of bright optimism. I see how difficult it was for him to plant the seeds of this love affair between Harry and me; we both resisted it.

First, his plan to lure Harry through their link and into the parlor where he would inevitably be inside one of my victims almost worked, but we figured out a way to diffuse Harry's longing for my True Face. Then he brought Harry closer to me through the Galvanizing Anemia that Floyd must have had something to do with. Then I nearly killed myself out in the woods trying to avoid the visions he sent me.

But then and at every point along the way, Voldemort was there, planting false memories, manufacturing all those early S/M fantasies that Harry might not have actually been a party to at all. The deciding hallucination that made me return to Hogwarts was the vision of Harry and me playing as children, so Voldemort learned that kindness was more likely to break down our defenses than lascivious daydreams. Once the pieces of grit that were the false memories started to develop into twin pearls in the minds of Harry and me, we have thought of nothing but each other.

"So courtly of you to wait until he's eighteen," the wizard sneers at the marionette whose strings he's been pulling for months.

"Why would you do this thing?" I demand, forgetting that I'm in my assigned place, naked on the carpet. "Why would you manipulate a boy's feelings? He's not going to know who he is."

Voldemort touches the Mark on my arm with a tip of his finger. The black taste floods my mouth and I get a glimpse of a dozen people's deaths and his enjoyment of them.

"I touched you once, harlot, when I Marked you. And you got inside of me like a canker, you bitch. I've not been able to think of anything but having you all these years. And have you I did, though without any risk to my magic. The boy wasn't doing anything with his anyway." He reaches behind a cushion and throws something at me. "Put them on. If you snag them I'll beat your hide."

They are stockings and a garter. The former the same color as his magic, the latter the color of blood. I hook the garters and think back to the first time Harry introduced them in our fantasies. I remember thinking that it, along with the corset, was an antiquated sort of Incongruency, one that he had little reason to know about.

"You are an absolute delight," Voldemort spits the words out like a curse. I think he actually means it, and it kills him to say it. "I have never been happier in all my life than the vicarious moments I spent splitting you in a seedy muggle hotel."

I think of all the poses he put me in, in those false fantasies of Harry's that must have been his. I swing my hair and get down on all fours and arch my back. I'm searching deep into the magical bond that we have established in our thoughts, trying to quickly separate the truth from the falsehood and find a place where I can control him. My True Face, my hand magic, something is stronger than this madman. "That's right, filthy slag, just like that," he grunts and gestures with his wand.

A couple of lackeys bring in Harry.

My eyes aren't focusing well in this memory so it's hard to place myself in my history.

There's a figure I can just make out floating in a dark cloud. The legs hang, long and emaciated, a foot or so off the ground. Its privates and part of its torso are covered in a kind of smock, but I can just glimpse the pale hip that proves there is nothing covering the back half of this man's body.

Is this someone I've killed? It must be, because my dead heart is thumping in roughly where my chest would be. This must be my retribution: I'm going to meet all my victims in the void, one by one, with nothing to distract us from the infinite process of my confronting what I've done.

Which one is it? I don't recognize this face at all! Did I really lose track that badly?

A Mantis Moth appears out of nowhere. I watch it kissing the man's face, crawling over his closed eyes. I feel a stab of sympathy. Poor devil: he's still alive and in a madhouse. Mantis Moths only abandon a body once all the life is gone, usually some hours after death.

An orderly comes in and uses a set of tongs to pluck off the moth, placing it carefully in a jar of solution he produces from his overall pocket.

Ah. He's enjoying better care than most who have lost their minds. The chap's not as unlucky as he could be. This must be a rather modern Wizard hospital, as they only hit upon the suspension method of dealing with the comatose rather recently. Easier on the skin, the person can move about if they become conscious—it could be worse.

The attendant sprays some kind of chemical I can't place on the man's skin and wipes it off with a sponge. At points I see the patient's facial muscles twitch, and once he moves his head, but from the way this arouses no reaction in the orderly I can tell that no one expects this stranger to ever return to the world of the sane.

The hospital worker leaves and I watch the man's face—blank, uninhabited, yet simultaneously alive with his unhinged thoughts—for some time. Again I feel sorry for this person I'm sure I've never seen before. His melancholy is pitch-black and oily, and he's floating in the unbalanced humor that has seeped out of his skull, utterly alone in his mind.

The orderly returns with a large comb.

Nnnoo.

No.

No.

No.

Nonononononononononono.

That's not black bile or any other humor showing itself around the madman, as often happens.

That's hair.

The hospital employee patiently combs the hair they have engineered to stick out from the head so as to not become tangled. Section by section, he does it with the air of completing a monotonous routine.

Another moth appears and lights on the hair, and it is dispatched just like the other.

"Take that, you bugger," the attendant says with some relish.

Hermès, kill me now so I don't have to watch my worst nightmare from the prison of my mind.

I want to look away from this face that is unfamiliar because it is my own. I've not seen it in any mirror, but the large. hooked nose and weak mouth are now unmistakably my own, though I would do anything to not have realized that. The stamp of family's physical traits is too strong for this to be any other lunatic.

The task of combing my hair finished, I am treated to the sight of myself being fed.

My madness is impeccably cared for. So there's that at least.

To distract myself I look at my hair and begin to make the calculations, adjusting for the poor nutrition from a liquid diet.

Three years.

It's been three years since the trial. And my mind has been gone just as long.

When the orderly leaves again I stare at this silky cloud, which must be very time-consuming to keep clean. That they would keep it long in obedience to some prophesy from when I was a child seems ridiculous. Or is it that they don't know the trick of how to cut it?

A terrible thought comes to me. Maybe they have cut it, and I've been in this place longer than three years. It could be a century, depending on what magics they are using to keep me inert. There's no science yet that can calculate how many years each digested wizard or witch adds to one's life.

I'm dead, I tell myself, clinging to the idea. This is Hell, that's all. It will pass and some other horror will take its place.

And a terrible thought does oblige. I imagine my mother in just this in-between state. She can see everything as if from a few feet away but not do anything to change it. Her body doesn't obey her anymore, but she can't look away from watching her child draining the life out of her,

I wonder if there's a way to commit suicide from the state I'm in.

But it's like trying to sleep with your eyelids removed. I can't help but watch.

Occasionally a nonsensical sound will come from the parched lips, and once the eyes opened to wheel around crazily in their sockets before closing again.

This body is the screen upon which a hundred loves were projected. It seems impossible. Why has nobody killed it?

Time seems to have abandoned this brightly lit room, so I don't know how many days pass. Eventually a different man comes in. He's not wearing a uniform, and I can tell by the way he moves that he's a wizard. He is disgusted by the proximity to me, but for some reason he stays for a few minutes to take notes.

The orderly must be a muggle. He moves completely naturally near me.

What sort of hospital is this?

When the wizard, most likely a ministry employee, leaves as quickly as he can, I think things will settle back to their routine.

Until Harry comes in immediately afterward.

"Harry! It's me, Severus! I'm awake! I can see you!" I shout with all my might. "Help me! Get me out of here! You know how I hate asylums! I'm not mad! My mouth doesn't work, that's all."

And my eyes and my legs and hands. Only a few random sounds, that have nothing to do with the words I want to say, come out of the mouth.

Harry is talking. He's talking to me! But I can't hear him at all. Have I gone deaf? Is that the problem?

But no, I heard the orderly talk to the moth—when was that?

No wait, there it is, I hear it: gibberish, so distorted it doesn't even sound like Harry's voice.

And then he leaves.

Wait! I was just beginning to place you! Don't leave me all alone with this body that isn't mine.

It's just me and a rotating staff of muggle attendants for several eternities after that.

This gives me time to think about my situation—just what part of my mind is it that is separate from the rest of me? How can I put them back together—or am I meant to leave my body behind and finally die?

Some rather interesting philosophical conversations with myself ensue.

Until I feel it.

Though the light never dims, the nights are distinguishable from the days here because an employee only checks on me from time to time at night, versus the bulk of my physical upkeep, which is accomplished on the day shift.

And of course, the nights are when the moths are the worst. I remember from my mother. Why don't they build me a cage like my father did for her? I rage from the locked ward where I've gotten lost in my mind.

It seemed terrible, watching the moths flit around the face—my face—kissing it with their glowing green faces while they wring their hands—busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy hands.

"What was that?"

Having existed as a disembodied awareness all this time, the physical sensation feels like a thunderbolt.

"Oh no. No. Not this." I can see the moth in exquisite detail from several feet away, but at the same time I feel its velvety hands and even the soft displacement of air by its beating wings.

"Move! Move your head, you dolt! Shoo it off," I rage at my body, which stays completely still.

I don't know how long this situation goes on, but I am confident that some of my sins are purged by this purgatory, cleverly designed using my worst nightmare: a madness with moths.

At some point I must have gone totally mad, even this little bit of me that had held out must have gotten dispersed into the universe. Because I remember nothing but a chaos of colors and sounds for what some remnant of awareness assumed would be forever.

"Mum? The fire's gone out, Mum."

"What was that?"

That was not my voice. Neither my physical nor my mental voice.

Another of Severus Snape's life axioms holds true: things are never as bad as they can get.

"Who is this in my mind? Get out, get out, you bastard, whoever you are. Don't you have something better to do than harass a poor crazy man? This is a terrible mind to be in—go somewhere else!"

Even the moths are better than the idea of being locked up in my mind with an intruder.

"'But he must not look only on the earth, because he is a very special prince, a half-blood prince who belongs as much to the water as to the earth,' she says suddenly, waking up."

Yes, that's exactly how my mother used to tell the story, but who else would know that but me?

"I'm searching deep into the magical bond that we have established in our thoughts, trying to quickly separate the truth from the falsehood and find a place where I can control him. My True Face, my hand magic, something is stronger than this. 'That's right, filthy slag, just like that,' he says and gestures with his wand.

"A couple of lackeys bring in Harry."

The voice continues past the point I can't remember.

"Harry looks like he's physically unharmed but psychologically shattered since last I saw him. He shuffles away on all fours from the Death Eater who grins at the sight.

"'Leave us,' the Dark Lord commands, and it is just the three of us in that loathsome parlor.

"'You see this great prize of yours?' Voldemort says to Harry. 'This is what she is. She'll give it away to any takers. You only knew what to do with this little whore because I taught you what to do with her.'

"Voldemort has slipped unconsciously into using the female pronoun. He describes all of the perversions that Harry and I shared so delightedly. That we thought were our private pleasures. He has gone through our memories and even the Dark Lord can't trace what is true from what is false from what is truth grown on falsehood anymore.

"'I love you Severus,' he repeats in Harry's tone. 'I might have let you two go on fucking each other into oblivion.'

"Harry's head hangs oddly on his neck. He doesn't even look at me, but he seems beyond the goading Voldemort is in the mood to give out.

"'Watch!' he commands and Harry's head snaps unnaturally straight on his neck.

"Harry looks at me.

"We haven't been trading in truth and lies between our minds all this time for nothing. It's not even a thought because we can't risk thoughts being intercepted. It's a conviction. We will stop this now at whatever cost.

"And then I have something far more private and sacred than either a thought or a conviction. A truth blazes across my blackened brain: Harry has done nothing to deserve this, and I won't stand for him taking any risk at all to stop it.

"There needs to be an end to me anyway.

"Turning to Voldemort I empty myself of everything until my magic is a perfectly reflective surface. His face starts to relax despite himself. Everything he has ever wanted flashes before his eyes.

_The woman stands on the streetcorner where I've been watching her for months. She's probably 19 or 20 but looks older from all that she has witnessed plying her trade. I especially like watching her come back from these engagements, the rips in her stockings, her hands reflexively smoothing the wrinkles out of her dress and patting down her auburn hair. This is the bitch I want. I want nothing more than to tie her hands so she can't smooth away the evidence that she's been rutting like a bitch in some alley._

_They all have something special about them that makes me choose to be their husband in death, but this one, she is a true prize._

_Smarter than most, once I've snatched her to my secret place she tries to learn how to please me, and unlike anyone else, she actually hits upon the right recipe. She doesn't plead—the exercise of her arts has taught her to sense unerringly what a man would want, and though she has doubtless never fallen into the clutches of a man such as I, she cries just enough when I whip her. Nothing excessive. Just enough to show me that she feels me. She knows to reflect my absorption in her body back at me, so that we are both examining the strange shape of my desire and her broken body's increasing resemblance to this shape._

_I like her because we are two peas in a pod. We can see straight through the pretense the rest of the world tries to clothe its naked depravity in. Only that knowledge has made me her keeper and her my poppet, and forcing her to understand the order of things is a most delightful task._

_Over a period of days she lets me dress her, beat her, starve her, and she never speaks in her own defense. It's a contest of wills and she's confident that, consummate whore that she is, she'll finally satisfy me and then I'll let her go._

_But there is only one place I will let her go, and it is at the moment of entering that far realm that I will take her and be satisfied._

_The anticipation of what this wily, strong-willed prostitute will look like at the moment of death has me boiling over with passion. Unable to think of anything else, I go out for the precise garments I want her to wear, a pristine bodice, silk stockings, all the things I like._

_When I come back she is dead. Strangled with the length of one of her coarse cotton stockings._

_She's the one who cheated me of her death. I never had her, and she's tormented me all these years until I saw her again that moment my hand touched—_

"Don't pull your little tricks with me, bitch," Voldemort exclaims, burying his personal memories deep within the impersonal blackness.

But it's too late. I've found the seed of his magic within all the evil magic he's acquired since. It is an orange with green sparks. I pounce on his magical core and I begin to drain at the same time I clamp down on his wand hand with more strength than I ever suspected I had.

"Stop, slut!" Voldemort shouts but his demeaning names for me mean nothing to me now.

He drops the wand. Unwilling to let focus off my hand magic I kick it towards Harry.

"I am everything you desire," I whisper and the postman's face softens.

"Crucio!" The curse strikes the dark wizard square in the chest.

It must be all the hate stored up in that wand that acts as a booster to his weakened magic, because it is Harry who utters the Cruciatus that ends Voldemort.

My friend collapses after the effort and together we watch for a few moments as all that evil magic pours out of the inert body. It has to go somewhere, and it's beginning to pulse into the room, searching for an exit. It licks towards Harry, as if it can sense the scar that once linked him to its deceased host. I didn't fight through all this to let the same evil back into the world, to lose Harry to it.

"No!"

I throw myself on it with Harry's shout echoing in my ears.

As the Dark Lord and I had both predicted, my unlimited powers as a solvent combined with his huge power create a sort of black hole. Together we form a perfect seal. For a moment I can sense Harry's purple-pink hammering on the edges, but then it is all pure blackness.

The faces of the deaths Voldemort was responsible for—directly or indirectly—flash before my eyes.

And they flash. And they flash. Hundreds of unique grimaces. Maybe thousands.

The dead wash over me like a tidal wave that keeps crashing again and again on the shores of my mind.

The Half-bloods they often split in two, or doused one half with a magical fire. The Muggle-borns they killed in ways that they deemed fitting for "mudbloods": burying them alive while under Petrificus was a favorite. The muggles without magic were killed any old way, not seen as being deserving of any kind of artful death.

These dead, they clamor at me for a reason for why they died, and I just don't know. I don't know if there ever was one. Totally unequal to the task of reassuring so many unquiet souls, as I have been to any task that has ever been set before me, I hope only to join their number so they stop asking me for answers I don't have.

_Think that you are present everywhere: in the sea, on earth and in heaven; think that you were never born and that you are still in the embryonic state: young and old, dead and in the hereafter. Understand everything at the same time: time, place, things: quality and quantity."_

_Corpus hermeticum, 1460, Marsilio Ficino's translation of the dialogues of Hermes Trisgmegistus_

The pain Voldemort couldn't feel, the suffering of his victims, bakes me until I'm a dry husk that falls apart.

Then this dust is scattered on the winds and I think it's over. In place of that painful heat there is nothing, and the nothing feels cold in comparison.

It's so cold.

"Mum? The fire's gone out, Mum."

It's one of my earliest memories, from when I could have been no more than three, if that, because she was still cooking dinner at that time—a task my father took over until I started doing it."

There is a silence. It is probably the most profound silence of my life.

Which it seems may not be quite over after all.

"Who are you?" I finally ask because I can't help myself.

"My name is Virgil," comes the surprised voice, a voice so neutral and soothing that I'm not surprised I mistook it for my own. "Sir, you can understand me!"

My heart thuds with dread at the last pieces of an enormous puzzle falling into place. The picture it makes is anything but easy to look at. "Yes, many animals have not met a large number of humans who can converse with them," I respond, trying to be polite. "I'm sorry that I didn't know enough to address you earlier. Please call me Severus."

"All right, Severus," the voice says, bubbling with enthusiasm. "Then you've understood everything I've said. I've brought someone back from the other shore! So few of us do. It's our calling, but people make it all but impossible for us to help them."

"Yes, callings tend to be difficult to hear and even harder to follow for any species, it seems." We share a warm moment, this tiny creature that has hauled me out of the abyss. "It's taken me some time to piece it together but I've heard it all, yes. Thank you, Virgil. You told the story much more gently and fairly than I would ever have managed on my own."

"I just told the truth. It's the only way to lead someone back from where you went. It's our Gift."

"And how did you manage to avoid detection?" I pursue casually.

A wriggle comes from behind what I suddenly reconnect with as my ear, snaking down my arm to my hand. "I hid in your hair. There's so much of it that not even the frequent combings could get everywhere at once," Virgil says, very satisfied with himself.

The prophesy explained.

Making a superhuman effort I locate the right nerves and force my head to the side and down. My eyes fly open. The Mantis Moth is on my hand. They've always been beautiful creatures with their iridescent blue and green wings. I couldn't see it before, though, because of the busy hands. Now Virgil's tiny hands are still, his work done, the tale of my life spun. Our eyes reflect the completion of a long journey made side by side.

"Thank you, Virgil," my disused voice says, full of sincerity, but a lifetime's worth of instinct is impossible to quell. My first act as a sane man is to squash the very creature that led me back to sanity.

Perhaps the worst period of waiting is being in control of my mind, and somewhat in control of my body again, but being imprisoned in that bubble, my muscles too wasted to even move it, my vocal cords too atrophied to scream, covered only by a smock.

When the attendant finally comes in he doesn't notice that my eyes are open. "Hello," is approximately what I croak.

He shouts in surprise and runs out of the room.

From all the hubbub that ensues one thing becomes very clear: it was much more convenient for everyone when I was mad.


	30. Chapter 30

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 30: Trial Documents

Archived Transcript of Trial, Prisoner #378517-2, One Severus Jacques Theophrastus Belacqua Laurent Snape, AKA "The Alkahest", September 1

Adjudicator for the Ministry: Norwood J. T. R. X. N. Applesmith

Witness for the Defense #5: Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

ADJUDICATOR: To test that the Veritaserum is working, please tell the court what you see in this picture.

DUMBLEDORE: (coughs) I see myself, half-transfigured into a rabbit, waiting at table for several of my students, one of whom pats me on the, er, behind.

ADJUDICATOR: Let the record show the witness is cooperating. Did you, sir, know what kind of a danger the accused posed to the students under your care?

DUMBLEDORE: I knew better what kind of a danger the boy Severus posed to wizarding society should he continue without any training. He was a ten-year-old child who had just absorbed all of the power of his very gifted mother, on top of his own power which we still don't understand very well. Should I have left him to stumble around soaking up others' magic?

ADJUDICATOR: Did you not think of banishing him to the muggle world rather than risking your other students' well-being?

D: (laughs) He may not harm muggles in precisely the same way, but his power could have burst from him while upset and killed someone as unconsciously as a sneeze. His instructors noticed these explosions of magic many times during his first year. But the question remains, where would you have had him sent, in the muggle world?

A: There are institutions for abandoned boys, I hear.

D: Yes, I believe one Thomas Riddle is the product of such an institution.

(murmurs in the court)

A: Silence! So why did you let this—anomaly—take classes with other children, have sport, mealtimes and even sleep in a common dormitory? Could you not have put him in a private room or given him a tutor for most subjects? You say he was a genius. Why not let him teach himself, with regular examinations?

D: Because the complete isolation you describe would have been the surest way to take all that unharnessed magic and turn him into some kind of sociopath.

A: (unintelligible)

D: Children need to be around others, even if they seem blurry and far away as they did to the young Severus, surrounded by the protective wards that kept much of other's magic from reaching him directly. We, Madam Lessmore and some other interested members of the faculty, encouraged the boy to rely on a few adults for occasional socializing so that he was not completely isolated. Even then it was an experiment to see how much solitude, and how many unanswered questions, such a small child could take.

A: You used the word "experiment." You were doing experiments on the boy?

D: (clears throat) I meant only in the sense that we were constantly trying to maximize his comfort under extraordinary limitations. (Pauses, grimacing, then booms out) Yes! Yes! It was an experiment in how caring pedagogy can transform the seeds of evil into something good! Yes, it was a practically unique problem that engaged all of my ingenuity. To learn how that rarest of creatures, the Alkahest, functioned—to channel all of that power from a bad start into a good end. Yes! He was an experiment!

(A silence).

A: And how did your little experiment turn out, Professor?

D: He would have fared far worse under others' tutelage, or none at all.

A: I ask you again, yes or no, did you know how dangerous the boy Snape's presence was among hundreds of children of known magical inclination?

D: (unintelligible noises). Yes!

A: And did you at any point see these dangers being realized?

D: As a boy he had fewer brawls and incidents of that nature than most. I did have to speak to him once or twice about stilling a teacher and a student with wandless magic

(Murmurs in the court).

D: Which he obeyed. He was a model student for years, scarcely lifting his nose out of a book.

A: Until…

D: Until he, er, reached puberty. A happenstance we had long prepared for.

A: It seems your preparation did not prevent the accused from nearly draining the magic out of another student—several students.

D: We went so far as to have the girls' robes warded against him! The girls' dormitories were fortresses. Professors were watching for so much as a glance between a female student and Severus.

A: And why did you not extend the courtesy to your male students?

D: If same-sex experimentation is a long-standing yet silent tradition in boarding schools, and if young master Snape felt compelled to conceal his homosexual activities from the adults in his life, I think those are circumstances with roots far beyond Hogwarts and the competency of this court, sir.

A: There was nothing about his manner that suggested these were deeper inclinations? The long hair he affects? The stilted manner of his speech?

D: It was a family prophesy to leave his hair the way it was—who was I to contradict his dead mother! And the other students teased him mercilessly about his French accent in English and his tendency to switch to other languages without realizing—he learned to speak carefully and enunciate. Does that make him a predestined deviant?

A: The witness will calm himself or we will use other methods to extract information.

D: (silence)

A: And once the accused was found to be engaging in sexual relations with more than one boy, and to the serious detriment of one boy in particular?

D: I discussed the matter with him and he voluntarily agreed to my programme of complete isolation, with a private room. I did encourage him to become active in a therapeutic organization for students. Its leader was a very compassionate young woman who immediately made a friend of Severus.

A: And you did nothing to discourage their overly close friendship, her visits to this room of his, even?

D: The girl was subjected to close scrutiny, and once she began showing a deeper interest, was subject to twice-weekly physical and magical examinations. It was a platonic friendship, as far as we knew, and the girl's magic was even much improved due to Severus' influence and potions. Lilly bloomed only when Severus entered her life. Am I to object to two people finding what they need in each other?

A: Until he kidnapped her to London to take what he needed.

D: Until they went dancing on her initiative. Is dancing on trial as well, Mr. Adjudicator? Or the memory of Lilly Evans-Potter?

A: The witness will be advised that I ask the questions in this courtroom.

D: (unintelligible)

A: So how is it the girl was physically healthy but ended up going mad?

D: There is much we don't understand about his condition, but as Mr. Snape's science will tell you, each individual's magic reacts differently to stimuli.

A: And his reaction to her lunacy, which should have been all the proof necessary that he must not ever touch a magical person?

D: Severus was inconsolable. He even volunteered to suffer chemical or physical methods to make him—not a sexual being.

A: And you refused this suggestion? It seems most sensible!

D: If young people's education were left in the hands of a judicial system that believes in cutting off the part that offends, our graduating classes would be full of amputees and castratis who had never learned to discern right from wrong themselves. Pardon, Sir Adjudicator, the Veritaserum is making me speak more frankly than I would care to.

A: But you had his consent—is that not reason enough to err on the side of safety?

D: The truth is (pause) we had already tried a minimally invasive form of magical control over his sexual functions—suppressing nothing other than the formation of ejaculate, which is harmful to the skin and magic of anyone who comes in contact with it. (pause) It appears these things are much more difficult to control than one would like.

A: Please be specific.

D: (Redacted).

(Disquiet in the court)

D: If we couldn't change even one aspect of his sexuality, how do you think we fared trying to make him do without all affection and human closeness?

A: (Unintelligible.) Returning to the former line of questioning, you are suggesting that the unaltered, fully sexual Severus Snape does, in fact, understand right from wrong, and yet has committed heinous acts regardless?

D: I would humbly put to the court that this is precisely the human condition in which we all find ourselves.

A: None of us present ever took the Mark, sir.

D: Then I ask those present to consider what they would do if, at the age of 16, they were to find out that any intimacy with anyone who could possibly understand them was forbidden. Beyond forbidden, tantamount to murder. Someone gave Severus the opportunity to relieve himself without restriction, and he took it. These were consenting adults, mind you. Other boys did much the same behind the Quidditch stands. Even then he was using what he was learning towards his life's study in Spagyrics.

A: Are you aware if these "learning activities," as you call them, ever resulted in grave harm or even death to his—partners?

D: I am not aware of this, no.

A: But you did not try to find out.

D: No.

A: If you had found out that he had, in fact, digested the magic of someone so completely as to cause his death, what would you have done?

D: What's one Death Eater more or less? (Claps hands over mouth).

(Exclamations in court).

A: And I submit to you, sir, that if the judicial system were run by kindly professors, we might perhaps have fewer prisoners making it to trial.

D: (Unintelligible).

A: Since you seem to grasp both the dangerous pervert and the high-minded scientist in the accused, though you place an indefensibly greater emphasis on the latter than the former, perhaps we should hand the work of justice over to you after all, Professor.

(Motions to the bailiff).

Bring the image of the accused before the court once more.

(Bailiff summons the projection of the prisoner, who contorts and gibbers).

What would you have us do with this personage?

D: Release him into my care.

(Furor in the court).

A: Silence! Has not your "care" done enough, professor? Your methods are a resounding failure! How else do you explain what he did to the Potter boy—the second Potter boy—this one, one of his students?

D: I encouraged them to work together, sir. I should be on trial, not Severus.

A: Perhaps you should—why would you encourage a known sexual deviant to get close to a young boy?

D: Severus was close to both his parents and was devastated when they died. Harry needed someone to look up to, someone who knew his parents. He was also in desperate need of magical formation, and Severus was and is one of the most gifted instructors in obscure magics. His intuitive abilities make him unsurpassed in finding solutions tailored to the subject. Once I saw what he was able to do with Harry, we were planning a whole new course of study preparing students for conflict situations. The young people who had observed the sessions were most enthusiastic. It was to be the dawn of a new age in magical instruction.

A: Another experiment.

D: One that is never to be, as long as the man who has all that knowledge and ability locked in his head is himself locked in a cell.

A: This pedophile you encouraged to get close to the Boy Who Lived, what sort of precautions did you take that nothing untoward happened?

D: The same we took with his mother. We looked for any trace of Professor Snape's magical signature—which takes very specialized techniques to trace, by the way—on his skin. Harry's professors were asked to look for any sudden dips in magical ability. If the boy seemed unduly fascinated by the professor, that was also a warning sign we asked—not in so many words—his friends to look out for.

A: And his friends saw no reason for concern?

D: They, like many students, felt a certain antipathy for Professor Snape because of his strictness and, er, tendency to sarcasm. They were the ideal spies, and when their attitude changed from tolerating the ill-tempered professor who was giving Harry special training for battle, to grudgingly accepting this same professor as a mentor—well, that was the strongest approval I could hope for.

A: Did they have any sense that their friend was homosexually inclined?

D: May I humbly submit that the much-abused Mr. Potter is not on trial here, and that any theoretical inclinations would be neither cause nor effect of the events that took place.

A: We shall hear from experts in these matters shortly. For now, you will relate in detail what you did when you first suspected something was awry in this "relationship."

D: It was not difficult to unmask the consulting physician, Dr. Floyd, as an emissary of Voldemort. The man was apparently so interested in furthering his career with treating a rare illness like Galvanizing Anemia that he was willing to be exposed to it himself. His article on treating Harry, which was far too detailed for someone who had merely treated a patient, was what alerted me that the doctor might be in the employ of our opponent.

He had apparently engineered a friendship with our nurse, Madam Pomfrey, that ensured he would be the medical specialist called in for any of Harry's more complex complaints. It is our opinion that this Floyd must have exposed Harry to the anemia while treating him for one of his illnesses related to nightmares.

My attempts to locate Dr. Floyd were unsuccessful, and he is believed to have eventually died of the illness, not having benefited from the extraordinary combined wisdom of Nurses Lessmore and Pomfrey and Severus Snape, as Harry did.

(Murmurs in the court).

A: Yet, after saving Harry's life, as you say, Snape went on to endanger his mind?

D: It was my suggestion that Snape concentrate on Legilimency and Occlumency with the boy—

A: Some of the least understood and most dangerous forms of unsanctioned magic.

D: Precisely. The boy was already exposed to Voldemort's magic—we knew he had frightful nightmares that were endangering his mental and physical health as well as the safety of the school.

A: And how did you monitor what went on when this unbalanced adult male penetrated the mind of a young student?

D: There is so little we understand about the mind, sir, and tracking the activity of it in broader space and time has scarcely been thought of.

A: Yet it appears you thought of it—too late.

D: It was actually Professor Snape himself who thought of it—as a ruse, at first, a way to convince Harry that we could track his dreaming activities. We had the very delicate task of trying to find and retrieve Harry's consciousness from Voldemort's lair. This had to be without drawing attention to the fact that our student had stumbled into a Death Eater's mind while he—

A: Unfortunately, I must ask you to be specific.

D: (Redacted) with Snape.

(Outrage in the court).

A: It is understandable you wished the boy to remain ignorant of these quasi-vampiric sexual sessions his beloved professor enjoyed with Death Eaters, but how did the lie become truth? How did you infiltrate the boy's dreams?

D: Severus discovered that he could, in fact, follow Harry's magical signature into the dream world, or the mental world in general. Up until this point, Severus had perhaps known what he could do with his mind, but I don't think he considered any practical use for it. He actually avoided developing the talent in case Voldemort ever tried to harness it. In magical writings this sort of willful activity—I say willful because necromancers, automatic writers, psychics, all can follow revelations given to them, but concerted activity in these subtle realms is very rare—opens up huge uncharted territory.

A: To which you abandoned the student in your charge, along with a madman.

D: This is one area where I can document exactly what I thought and did. There are Ministry records from the time I began to worry that Voldemort not contacting either of his known human portals was a bad sign.

A: Let the record state that the Ministry is to divulge all related records. If you could give the court a brief summary until this documentation is produced.

D: At the time, the Ministry was greatly concerned with the lack of coordination among its ranks—at times, there was so much confusion or downright hostility that it was very difficult to get things done. It was not safe to engage Severus, the only known person to be able to clearly observe the activities of the human mind, so we had to experiment with different versions of Dreamless Sleep prepared by less skillful hands, each designed to prevent the vulnerabilities that dreams tend to bring.

A: And how did this particular experiment turn out?

D: It worked remarkably well. A certain number of Ministry workers were left in a control group and received no remedies. As long as they were left to dream, their movements and speech were carefully watched and they were not allowed near any of the intelligence about the offense and defense of the Ministry.

The rest were given a mild potion that kept their dreams vague. A variant of one of Severus' potions that he also used at the time, as it happened. Their behavior and their magic was the same as always, and there were no impediments to their focus on defeating Voldemort.

A: By which you deduced that Voldemort had been engaged in some type of dream warfare?

D: Exactly. A much less concerted effort than what he did to dear Severus and Harry, thankfully. Through the link he shared with them, he was able to watch their dreams, and he began shaping these dreams with suggestions that suited his purpose. When Severus and Harry proved to have a surprisingly easy time entering each others' minds—perhaps eased by their shared vulnerability to Voldemort—the Dark Lord began facilitating these mental meetings, in which we will probably never sort fact from fiction, exactly as he intended. For instance, it would take a Severus and a Harry in better shape than they are now to compare each and every "shared memory" to see if it was really experienced by both of them or if Voldemort used a corner of one's subconscious to masquerade as that person to the other of them.

By the end, his ability to watch their waking activities had gone from the occasional involuntary visit to acting as a quasi-participant. But after all is said and done, Voldemort never was able to move as freely in these realms as Severus could, who described to me a sort of magical map that could allow him to find and enter any person's magical signature, whether that witch or wizard was awake or asleep.

(Gasps in the court).

Nevertheless, Voldemort grasped the utility of this realm far better than I did: Severus' statement that a lie-memory, like a piece of grit, quickly becomes pearled over with associations and images that make it indistinguishable from the truth.

A: So you are maintaining—but unable to prove—that Voldemort suggested a few of these pieces of smut, er, grit, and the minds of Severus and the boy did the rest? That implies that only an infinitesimal portion of the guilt goes to the Dark Lord and the rest to these men's minds equally? This hardly works in the Defense's favor.

D: Similar lies, much less tailored to the dreamer, were enough to make Ministry employees who had worked together for 20 years sabotage each others' desks and hex their shoes. Else why would they stop doing so when their dreams were inhibited?

(Consternation in the court).

A: Silence! The assignations that take place in the dream world may be beyond this court's reach. This we aim to see. But the important questions, really the only questions, are these: Did this adult man, who knew he was both a pervert and a dangerous magical creature, did he know that he was being manipulated by the Dark Lord whom he served? And did he at any point realize that the sexual content of his mental rendezvous with a student made them so inappropriate that he should take any steps necessary to stop them?

D: Have you ever been deluded, Sir Adjudicator? May I ask if you are able to completely control your actions and thoughts at all times? Severus was extraordinary in that he did not lay one finger on Harry until the boy was no longer his student. By the time they chose to be together, Harry Potter was a young man of eighteen years of age.

A: But the things they did in their minds (unintelligible)—it poisoned the boy, made him unable to freely choose anything else by the time he was eighteen. And this court has not yet decided if Mr. Potter was even of sound enough mind to make this decision at the time of the (unintelligible).

D: All we can say for certain is that is what Voldemort wanted. We will never know what Severus or Harry would have chosen without that intervention. But, given the same concern that you might be controlled by someone else's power, that you might have the urge to, say, take a liberty with someone under your care like an employee, would you do as Severus did and go out into the forest to die?

He tried to cut his own arm off to free himself of the Mark and thus Voldemort's influence—how many of us would have struck ourselves silly until we succeeded, only to find that another peculiarity of the Alkahest's constitution is that weapons cannot cause a lasting wound?

(Murmurs in the court.)

This man almost starved himself to death trying to escape from the urge to get to know the boy. As I understand it, only the belief that he could help Harry in ways he received no help as a child, only that brought him back to us alive.

A: You paint a very pretty picture of this, this, monster, Professor Dumbledore. But why should we believe what you say about the thoughts and motivations of a man whose mind you admit was completely closed to you?

D: Without the testimony of a sane Severus Snape under the effects of Veritaserum, you cannot know, sir. Short of that, you must rely on the testimony of those who knew him best. I believe that young Harry has already testified most insistently that Severus repeatedly tried to dissuade him from seeking any type of romantic relationship with him, and that the boy, er, took the initiative.

(Horror in the court.)

A: Any subtle potion or spell Snape may have used on the boy has long since worn off and is thus untraceable. That he waited to have his way until he would not be sent to Azkaban for molesting a student means nothing if he set the trap much earlier and then waited like a spider for Mr. Potter to fall into his trap once the law could not prevent it.

Besides, the boy was obviously distraught in court and had to be spelled into unconsciousness after a fit.

D: And I'm sure having his own experience completely discounted had nothing to do with this fit.

A: I believe that will be all, Professor Dumbledore. It is beyond this court's scope to make recommendations about the administration of an independent school, but we do hope that you will take seriously any instruction your Governing Board may have for you regarding your "experiments."

D: I am at your disposal at any time, Sir Adjudicator. But the Veritaserum impels me to express my concern—what will become of Severus Snape?

A: I myself will only feel comfortable with the creature locked up—in Azkaban or the madhouse, it doesn't matter to me. But the witness we are most anxious to hear from—the one best placed to clear up the matter of Snape's motivations and intentions—is also engaged in a court battle of her own. I fear that Nurse Lessmore may expire before her physicians agree to let her take the Veritaserum, which by all accounts may be a kind of suicide in her frail health.

(Protests in the court).

Silence! I leave it up to someone else's court to decide this woman's competency to manage her own affairs. If she is found competent in that arena, then her word will be entered into the record in this court.

Witness is excused.

THE DAILY PROPHET, 23 September

Note from the Editors:

The Daily Prophet has obtained a copy of the transcript from Madam Aramis Lessmore's testimony at the Alkahest's trial. It was a stipulation of her will that the transcript be released to the press with the option of reproducing it in full, unedited, or not at all, upon her death, which sadly occurred one day after her appearance in court. In the interests of conveying news in a timely fashion to our dear readers, the Prophet has agreed to the unusually restrictive conditions and will be presenting the text just as it was recorded. We are, however, taking legal steps to protect ourselves and the free exercise of our journalistic integrity from any future hindrances of this sort.

(TRANSCRIPT OF TRIAL, PRISONER #378517-2, ONE SEVERUS JACQUES THEOPHRASTUS BELACQUA LAURENT SNAPE, AKA "THE ALKAHEST", September 20)

WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE #28 (Madam Aramis Barbara Lessmore, Nurse, Bonded by Magical Health Authority and Nursing Guild)

ADJUDICATOR: In light of the extraordinary sacrifice that the witness has insisted upon making with her appearance, the court cedes the floor to Madam Lessmore that she may speak freely insofar as her strength allows.

LESSMORE: Thank you, Sir Adjudicator. I fear that the delay of several weeks may mean I will not have the vigor to say all that has been in my heart for so many years, but I will do my best.

Many of you have heard all manner of nonsense about Severus, but the truth is we don't fully understand what he is, how he sees the world, or what he is capable of. He doesn't even know himself.

(Murmurs in the court).

And that is perhaps one of the many side effects of his condition—it is very hard to see Severus as he is. Because it is true that he tends to reflect whatever it is that the seer wants to see in him. That has surely happened in my relationship with him.

(Shocked sounds from the court).

I do not mean that I was in love with him, that I saw his True Face. Quite the opposite. I mean that he was my paid charge for almost the whole time that I knew him, and I saw in him a danger and an opportunity, combined. When Professor Dumbledore told me about a boy Alkahest, I was sure that treating such a child would make my reputation in the scientific community. The education of an Alkahest! Learning about his properties and special skills! Protecting others from his influence! I had a thesis started before he walked in the door.

The child who entered my infirmary looked for all the world as though he had been raised by wolves—that was the rumor at the time, at any rate. I have scarcely ever in my professional life seen a child so clearly neglected, so dirty, so infested with parasites. My training took over and I tried to nurse him back to health, and eventually to something like human society, while never forgetting that he could possibly kill me.

Every night I went to sleep thinking of the letter that accompanied our new student. The doctor that had attended his mother's death wrote about the extraordinary wasted state of the mother's organs and tissues. He wished that he'd been able to thoroughly examine the effects of long-term exposure to an Alkahest, but regrettably the woman's body and wand disintegrated into a pile of dust together in the middle of the autopsy.

A pile of dust. Every night before sleep I asked myself if it was worth it to risk this. For me, as a single woman alone in the world, to jeopardize my magic and my livelihood for a few games of Wizard Whist and late-night discussions as to the whys and wherefores of magical medicine with a humorless child of ten, who was proving very difficult to fit into a dissertation.

And for the payments. I am dying, and behind me I will leave quite a sum of money, entirely due to the extremely generous payments I received for taking time with Severus. The school and a secret beneficent society agreed that I would be well rewarded for my risks as Severus' designated human contact. It will be a stipulation of my will that all of this money goes back to Severus and his legal and medical needs, because it was wrong of me to benefit so much from what, after a very short while, I wanted to be for him.

People have used the phrase "second mother" for my relationship with him, but I would say that we have been great friends, the very best sort of friends who let nothing—almost nothing—not differing ages, not sorrow or disagreement, get in the way of our friendship.

But it is also true that we were family to each other. For I certainly used him and resented him at times as we do family. Why should I then not come here today as family to claim him as my own as no one has ever cared to do for him, his faults as my faults, his weakness as my own?

If I had the strength, I would find him wherever they are keeping him and embrace him the way I never had the courage to do, giving him some reason to return to the world that has tried to push him out of it since he arrived.

But instead, I shrank from any close physical contact with the squalid little boy who so quickly became a tormented young man. I bathed in Diotomaceous Elixir every night. I rubbed my skin with a series of lotions before work. I obeyed what a thousand old wives' tales had to say about protecting oneself from magical assault. And after every meeting with Severus, I always, without exception, performed the entire advanced first aid protocol of spells for Bonded Nurses, to make sure that my magic was intact.

Severus taught me many things. The Paracelsan method and some very advance potions theory, our budding Human Spagyrics science and the magical aspects of psychology. He showed me wandless magic and full-body incantations such as I'd never heard of. But perhaps most of all, he taught me two things: the nature of magic and the nature of love.

So jealous was I of losing my magic that it made it very hard to concentrate on the child sitting across from me—he almost never smiled, never laughed, only consumed books and knowledge like a starving animal, which on some level he must have been. It was frightening, watching this small being who had supported himself from his potions since the age of 7, unaware of the normal childish concerns that bonded the other students, concentrating only on learning the properties of more magical substances. And that was the way we wanted him!

From watching him, I learned that magical people are truly different than other humans, and not necessarily for the better. He couldn't help himself—this ruined child, this human with no hope or happiness, he just had to know more, to serve the very great powers he had to harness. Just as I was driven to do more with my intelligence and my magic than had been allowed me as a provincial nurse. It's nothing personal, one's following this star to the neglect of other people. In Hogwarts, it is encouraged. Else we become like Severus' mother, and die from not following it.

Together we researched and experimented, and we could be free of all the human considerations neither of us was particularly skilled at. We were just two magics working together in concert. And that was one of the greatest enjoyments I have ever known with another. True friendship, as I say.

But I mentioned I learned about love as well. For a moment, try to think of Severus not as this exotic specimen, nor even as a sexual being. Just think of him as a person who is gifted with the ability to love someone else, to unite as few can, and who has been prohibited from using this gift that is central to his nature. I am a woman, after all, and I know that Harry's mother, Lilly, was so thoroughly loved by Severus that she practically shone from it. You cannot convince me that there was any taint of madness or coercion in that relation up until the end. There are certain things that cannot be faked.

I have also seen Severus in his investigations trying to find ways to heal humanity of its ills, and he is extremely gifted at mixing personalized potions to heal. We treated patients together and it was a wonder to behold—all of his talents were finally in harmony. If all had gone well, he would be in a laboratory somewhere mixing potions, treating the sick and pursuing science that made your lives better without your even realizing it enough to hate him. If all did not go according to plan, it is because we asked one thing too much of him—Severus needed to love, and just like the demands of magic, this cannot be denied except to the detriment of the whole person.

When I think of all the meetings we had, preparing for the onset of his puberty! The books we ordered, the experts we consulted, all to prevent him from getting too close to someone and causing insanity or death! It makes me ill, now, to think of all we did to shape this young man's life, and how little we thought fit to tell him. It had simply become second nature, this grand plan, this path we had to push Severus on at all costs. The full knowledge about his mother's death we were pledged to keep from him. And instead, we left him ignorant of the changes he was going through, and unprepared for his first schoolboy romance. Above all, we left him with no one to turn to when he was being victimized by the other boys—yes, victimized, but no one was ever put on trial for it—because he had no reason to expect anything better.

If we had only not gotten into the habit of keeping things from him, I feel sure things would have turned out differently. Severus Snape is one of the most moral people I have ever known. If he were able to testify on his own behalf, none of us would be here today. He would simply tell us if he was guilty, and then tell us what his punishment should be. The only danger would be of him using this court as a means of suicide. But I do not think you would concern yourselves with that possibility in light of the charges against him.

The charge of interfering with a young person is very serious. It's something Severus himself would have no mercy for, having worked to heal young people who were the victims of trauma. About his relationship with Harry I cannot speak, because I had retired by this time. I do know that this is not what I would have wished for him—so many times I wished for the right person, woman or man, who was his equal, who was strong like him and thus could withstand his magic and his turmoil. I could see him having children, starting his own school, discovering cures for diseases, revolutionizing wizard psychiatric care.

Severus Snape was so full of potential. I wanted so many—too many—things for him that I didn't see these possibilities slipping away until they were gone. Or perhaps again, I was seeing what I wanted to see and not the mixture of good and bad, selfishness and selflessness that we all carry, and which in him is so starkly contrasted.

Did I notice when he started adjusting his potions due to what must have been the Reaper's Reward? Of course. Did I do anything? No, because it would have meant examining our whole enterprise, sidelining the founding a new science. I was too exhilarated with what we were discovering, with sending letters to obscure scientists and getting a thoughtful reply, with working on a new thesis, this one with Severus instead of about him, to want to examine what that canister of Cimarron Nonesuch Salt he had hidden behind his bookcase really meant.

If I knew right from wrong and ignored it, then why am I not the accused? Really, I should be on trial and not Severus. There are a thousand ways I failed him, another thousand that I pushed him in one direction instead of letting him find his own. I should have known that if it was easy for me, a spinster of 50, to suppress the impulse to hug a child in need of affection, if I forgot about it soon enough in favor of other projects, that it might be much harder for someone of a different constitution to suppress that part of himself for a lifetime.

At the very last of our time together, when he was my intern, I began to understand what the payments I was receiving for paying attention to him were doing to our relationship. I set up an account for him, a college fund, and felt that I could at last open my heart to him, thinking I had finally vanquished all fear of this Alkahest who was my friend.

But then he took the Mark. It was something I could not understand or condone. Something that could ruin me professionally if I were to be even associated with it. My ability to love was far, far punier than what was required to love Severus, much more insignificant than what he himself was capable of.

I have missed my dear friend Severus all these years, and I have missed our science together—it is impossible for me to unravel the two. So I am pleased to perform one last experiment with Severus Snape.

If no one, as I have said, has ever been able to claim him as he is—flawed and brilliant, capable of love and darkness, then I postulate that this very happenstance may have something to do with the hard path he's had to forge alone in life, with all its many failures. Ergo, I am introducing a new condition: unconditional caring for all of Severus without reserve. Sadly, I will not live to see the results, but I have hopes for this final experiment I only wish I'd undertaken earlier.

I do not lie here before you (as I am sadly unable to take the stand), and claim to judge what is right, what really happened, what you should do with this man who has so sadly lost his many faculties. One's deathbed is not a place for putting on airs, and that's what it would be to presume to answer these questions. All I can say is that the person you have restrained so he doesn't tear out his own eyes—he was and is the best part of my life.

If I did a bad job as his only caretaker, if his person far outshone my own, at the very least I tried with all my weak heart where few others would have concerned themselves at all. It is for the rest of you to ask how things might have gone differently. It is for me to die knowing that he threw himself into the abyss to save someone he cared about—and in so doing, save the Wizarding World, that place that has only treated him as a threat and an aberration—to save the Wizarding World from its great foe.

Now if you don't mind, I am very tired….

A: Madam, we are entirely in your debt. If you have finished speaking, the court thanks you for your appearance.

L: Oh, there was one more thing.

A: Yes, Madam?

L: The Veritaserum was a little heavy on the Sienna Bark. It's terribly hard on the kidneys, you see, and mine are in bad shape. Lest you think my ailments have anything to do with prolonged exposure to Severus, please know that I am dying of uterine cancer, as did my mother, my sister, my grandmother and many other relations before them. It has spread throughout my body, but if you consult the records I kept from my years of observing Severus, you'll find his recipe for Veritaserum that is much gentler on the system and just as effective. In fact, I will be making these detailed records from seven years' observation available to the court should you wish to learn more about our relationship and our research.

A: We should be honored to examine your records. Thank you, Madam Lessmore.


	31. Chapter 31

The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 31: The Last Will and Testament of S.J.T.B.L. Snape

It's a small cottage on the sea, in a remote area of France, and it's mine. Even most of the things in it are my old things, kept in quarantine by the ministry all this time. It's all I ask of Albus when he steps up to try and pick up the pieces of my life once again. Wizarding Britain wants me far away from its citizens' magic, and I want to be near the sea. My old friend, my only friend, helps me start the potion business that helps occupy my astonishingly empty mind. It's amazingly lucrative. Now that everyone knows about my condition, my potions are finally recognized as the best on the market.

The orders interest me not at all. That many of them are dangerous or just this side of the always-vague potions law is of no concern to me. The only thing that matters, the single moment that I am alive, is when the cooled liquids are poured into the phials and the salves are spooned into the jars, and they are, one and all, affixed with the label of my own devising. It reads, "The Alkahest," only because that is how people think of me now. That, also, is of no consequence. But when I affix the label to the container and the heat of my hand makes the words appear, as they did on the labels of my childhood:

Trained by Adept Eugenie Laurent, late of the Invisible School

Then, for a second, my mother lives again.

When my hands aren't taking solace in the routine recipes, my animal friends talk with me. I walk with my hair hanging down to the ground, dangling in the surf, always barefoot except in the dead of winter. No robes. Never any robes anymore. Supplies come in regularly by owl and donkey. It is very peaceful.

I write about everything for a year.

When this memoir is done I will walk into the ocean.

When Albus doesn't hear from me for a long time someone will come to investigate and find the manuscript and its instructions to deliver it to Harry. Tucked inside will be the trial documents Dumbledore sent me without a word, and which we have never discussed. I haven't actually seen my old friend in person, but he's been shaping my fragile new sanity ever since I returned to this side of oblivion.

Harry deserves to know the truth, or at least the most complete falsehood I'm capable of giving him. Every bit of my painfully won sanity is poured into this work. My only standard is to leave out anything that would reflect badly upon his parents. I've even sent off for a special quill and leather set, complete with an engraving charm, that has handsomely bound all the sheets with a beautiful embossed legend: The Last Will and Testament of S.J.T.B.L. Snape. I obtained the set from one of the bibliophile underworld contacts I remember Miss Bundle mentioning.

It turns out she didn't die in the embrace of her books after all. Hers is one of the deaths swimming in my veins. I recognized her in the infancy of my new sanity. Miss Bundle was set upon by one of the roving hordes of Death Eaters on the way to or from one of her black market purchases. Apparently, she was Muggle-born. We never spoke of such things; why would ancestry matter for the witch who was the single best-informed person about the wizarding world I've ever met? That she wouldn't have died the way she should have, as a consequence of her intoxication with knowledge, is one of the many injustices I have to live with.

Another face that assembles itself out of the cacophony of unquiet souls is my father's.

There's no telling when he died, though I now think there was a special significance behind Voldemort's asking me how long it had been since I'd seen my father, on that first evening in his parlor. When he finally associated the Hogwarts half-blood with Hercula Laurent, the evil wizard must have been delighted to find out that his new weapon of war had become an orphan in the most picturesque of manners.

It is known that the Death Eaters targeted groups in waves, and that one of the very first to be targeted, and at that most viciously, were the few muggles like my father, who lived within magical society. So I have every reason to believe that when they suffocated my father by pressing his head in a bed of plant soil, it was not too many years after he had lost my mother. This compelled me to do a little research about this class of muggles living within the Wizarding World. I rifled through the dream contents of some long-time Voldemort assassins I had met and came across memories of another muggle gardener's death. He was also smothered in dirt (who knows if this was as terrible a death as it was for the meticulously clean Augustus Snape). The Death Eaters subsequently cut the man into pieces and left each stuck in the dirt as a warning to wizards and witches who promoted too great a proximity between our "races." Perhaps that was my father's ultimate destiny as well.

All I know is his eyes blame me for everything, everything: for the actions of these Death Eaters I'd not even heard of at the time, but who he identified in that moment as being cut of the same cloth as me. These minions to the Dark Lord at least helped him go to his grave knowing exactly what kind of abomination he'd sired, and what had taken his wife from him bit by bit right before his very eyes.

I have to learn how to move around with this second and third sun that are his blaming eyes, trained on me at all times, burning into me without mercy, night or day, rain or shine.

For the first month or so, it's hard for me to do much of anything because I'm expecting to be re-arrested, not for the charges they couldn't find enough evidence for the first time, but for all the heinous crimes I committed under Voldemort.

For these, I will give myself up without any fight. I did those things. Those people's magic flows through my veins. They collapsed on themselves under me. Their deaths are marked on my soul, and I have no illusion about being able to get away with something like that. Dark Lord or no, I might have done the same to feed my appetites.

It takes me several weeks to understand that no one will ever come.

Sure, wizarding history is full of civil insurrections like the one led by Voldemort. Pragmatism always wins out over the desire to hold someone accountable, as it becomes clear that many people have blots on their conscience because of things they had to do or thought they had to do to survive during a violent time. As always happens after one of these attempted coups, a general amnesty is declared after some symbolic head or heads roll. This time, the amnesty came by general accord: it was best to put this particular chapter behind them as quickly as possible.

I have every expectation that mine will be that missing head. It's perfect, really. They get to kill two criminals with one stone: the Alkahest and the person they can make pay for many people's misconduct.

Gradually I come to understand that no one, but no one, will ever admit to having suffered my touch.

All those people, mostly men, must have passed many a worried moment since my name hit the national consciousness. Who would own up to having been bedded by me, even if it were posed as a violation?

Those who could claim they had witnessed my draining someone to death had probably, to a one, run that danger in my hands themselves. And those who had avoided the temptation of merging with true love in my arms, they were at least guilty of watching—and either enjoying the spectacle or doing nothing to prevent a death, or both.

Veritaserum would have made a scandal out of any of these potential accusers.

If my sense of humor hadn't been lost somewhere between that Other Shore and this one, I might get some enjoyment out of imagining the Minister and his cronies trying to cajole, extort and purchase someone's memory of rutting with the Alkahest.

They must have consulted necromancers to try and contact those who would be only too willing to point a ghostly finger at me for my felonious caresses, but perhaps my dead know that I am not long for this world and prefer to keep their fingers still until they can use them for tearing me apart in the next world.

But instead of focusing only on these deaths, I've focused my shaky mind on writing. That's what I've done these nights, since leaving the asylum. I have slept only a few hours here and there, what with all that evil magic I absorbed from Voldemort flowing through my veins.

As if my own sins weren't unbearable, now I have to bear thousands more. It is too much.

Everything is too much without Harry.

I can't stop thinking of every minute of our time together as real, instead of a ploy to keep the Boy Who Lived distracted by the Alkahest, unsurpassed sexual ragdoll to comfort all comers.

"At least I know that when I'm not here anymore Harry can't think of me as anything other than a ghost," I remark idly to an egret while sitting on my porch. "That will be the first true thought he's had about me. He'll have this whole thick volume of the worst truths to file in their rightful place, most of them before his birth, and then soon he'll be able to leave it all behind and go on living once I've stopped trying to live, which I was never good at anyway.."

The Polyjuice goes on and off the boil. Three skin salves are composed, cooled and put into phials. My hands are finally tired of doing magic. It's almost time.

I return to the manuscript to make some finishing touches for another day.

The porch boards creak.

"I fucking hate you, Severus Snape!"

Harry Potter is throwing stones at my windows.

(End Book 1)


	32. Chapter 32

The Pelican's Bequest Book 2 / Chapter 32: Under Pain of Life

Maybe if you—the responsible adult—weren't so sick in the head you wouldn't have gotten the Mark in the first place and then you wouldn't have let him in to your head and none of this would have ever happened."

His aim with projectiles is much worse than it used to be, but his words fare far better, my mind registers.

"You're terrified of ever taking responsibility for anything, so you run away and hide behind your shields and guess what? You end up fucking up anyway. You think I'm an idiot, don't you Severus? There is one thing I have never had any illusions about, and it's that you are going to keep being a fuckup for as long as you live."

His words paralyze me with a truth stronger than any spell.

"You could have been anything you wanted. The most respected scientist in the wizarding world. You could have invented potions that saved lives. You could have used all that power and intelligence for anything other than being a small-time teacher at a school where it was safe, where everyone let you act like a petulant bastard and where you never had to take a risk."

He takes a ragged breath.

"I've seen your True Face, all right, Severus Snape, and you are a whiny, self-absorbed, socially disabled, lily-livered, pathetic excuse for a man who never accepted his sexuality and never learned how to accept love.

"And don't tell me this isn't love, you heartless bastard. I love you, you sick fuck, and you will not minimize it in any fashion, under pain of life, that life you're so afraid of living. There are people who never go through half what we've gone through together, and society just leaves them alone and lets them love each other if they want to. Are you so clueless that you're going to just lie down and accept people's definition of who we are and what we can be together instead of trying to find out if we can be better than they say we can? Do you have any idea how lonely it's been, when not anyone, not even Albus, believes we can be anything but harm for each other?"

Here he turns to the birds that have been looking at me anxiously. "The only person that understands where I'm coming from, the only one that can help me figure out what happened to us, the only one that was there, and do you know how much it hurts that not once did he even try to find out how I was this whole year he's been out of the hospital because he prefers the company of a couple of tatty birds to me?"

The birds ruffle their feathers and glare at his tone.

"I have something for you."

My voice sounds strange to me, speaking English instead of an animal language. It sounds serene, and this seems to frighten Harry for a moment.

"What makes you think I want anything from you?" he retorts, as if he wants a lot more than he would care to admit.

Afraid that he's going to leave while my back is turned, I walk backwards to the kitchen and retrieve the book I've been writing. I stand at the doorway with it. "Can I get you a drink?"

He looks at me with more weariness than someone of twenty-two should possess. This really could go either way. Finally, he moves towards my house. "Scotch is good, yeah."

My first human visitor comes in, drops his coat on an end table and sits at the kitchen table. He takes off his shoes and then downs the drink in one gulp with the unmistakable air of a seasoned drinker. He lights up without asking if it's all right to smoke inside and begins to read.

Harry reads for hours upon hours, silently, his face blank except for a scowl that seems to have etched itself into permanent residence on his brow. Once or twice he laughs, and I wished he didn't because the sound is so harsh. Occasionally he stops to rest his eyes by smoking and staring at nothing. I put a fish soup with rice in front of him and he grunts, lifts the spoon to his mouth and keeps reading.

Finally, very late, he is finished. I've been watering down his drinks but he is bleary eyed and passive. He opens a new pack of cigarettes from his jacket. "You're pathetic," he says, but without the bile from earlier.

I open my mouth.

"Are you going to fucking agree with me because so help me I'll slap you," he says without inflection.

"What would you have me do?" I ask humbly.

"I don't know, maybe you should do what you feel for a change. And maybe I'll slug you for it. You have no way of knowing. It's called life."

I move my hand a fraction of an inch towards him and he's suddenly an inch away from my face and glowering with pure hate. "You think I'd ever want you to put those sick hands of yours on me?"

I lean away and put my hands behind my back.

His voice comes at me with quiet anger that is worse than the hate. "You coward. If I really loved someone I'd never give up on them, the way I've never given up on you."

My hand moves a half-inch towards him and he punches me in the chest. "That's it? That's all you have to offer?" he taunts and gives me a quick right-left. I move the hand a little closer. "That's all you can take, you miserable cunt?" The hand is almost to his shoulder and he's hurling abuse and punches and part of me remembers when he was so angry with me when I was teaching him shielding.

He's staring at me because I stopped moving. "That's really it?" he says, childlike and vulnerable.

"I was just remembering when you were throwing things at me while learning to shield." I smile.

"I thought you were a god, Severus. There was nothing you didn't know. The fact that you would take the time to teach me something meant everything to me."

He punches me hard in the jaw and I don't even try to keep myself from falling. "And you didn't even really care. You were doing it because He made you."

He's kneeling over me and punching me in the ribs, the chest.

Harry's right. I do have an immense amount of power that I seldom use.

It is so easy to step between the punches and find a path between the anger and the pain. Then he's in my arms. He's sobbing like a child and cursing in his man's voice with his man's shoulders shaking. He cries for a long time.

Finally I summon a salve from my cabinet and open it while he's leaning on my shoulder, exhausted. What is left of Harry when all this anger is spent? I wonder.

My fingers anoint his forehead and his wand hand with the compound. He starts—it's a little cool. "What is this?" he asks.

"You have a headache from too many drinks and cigarettes," I say. "This is my patented formula—" I show him the Alkahest label— "It will work soon, but you should also lie down."

He doesn't ask how I know he has a headache, but I can feel it through his skin. Everything about his body is screaming at me to acknowledge it, to be rough, to be gentle, I can hear a thousand different entreaties, one for every square inch. This minefield of contradictory anguish, which would be unbearable with anyone else, feels like the first real thing that's come into my orbit since I left the hospital.

It's the only home I have, and better than I deserve.

I settle him on the couch and begin to move away, but he pulls me down to use my lap as a pillow. "I've been alone for my whole life, Severus, and you would leave me now?"

His arms are around my waist and he snuggles into my lap, not reacting to the arousal it seems pointless to hide. When he's drifting off to sleep it seems safe to give him a kiss on the forehead. He pulls my head towards his mouth and I kiss him again.

He sleeps. I levitate us over to the bed and he sprawls out, a man who could easily pass for thirty, in need of a haircut and a shave. In need of so many things. I fall asleep too, finally, with one hand in his hair and the other memorizing the now fully stubbled cheek.

I wake up, unaccustomed to sleep, and it takes me a moment to realize that he was there and is gone. I gather up my coat with the deepest pockets and plan to choose some rocks for my journey to the depths.

Harry's out on the porch, smoking. He's made himself some tea and a half-eaten pear is in a dish beside him.

I teeter and sink bonelessly down on the step, grabbing at his shoulder to break my fall. He looks up quizzically. "I thought you'd gone," I say, not trying to hide my upset.

"You really are a stupid man, aren't you Severus Snape?" he says and pulls my arm around him. I rest my chin on his head and he picks up the pear. "How do you say this in French?" he says, looking up at me.

"Poire." I say.

He asks me about Bulgarian and Romanian, Mandarin and Turtle, every human and animal language he can think of, and I tell him until he's laughing at the way I speak Owl. He holds the pear to my mouth and I take a bite. He pulls my head down and tastes the pear in my mouth, adding a savor of tobacco to the sweet juice.

"That's the first thing I've tasted in so long," he says wonderingly, and something in me breaks.

"I couldn't taste things for years until I started falling for you," I confess for the first time. "The dark magic made my tongue not work right. The first thing I tasted was broth when I decided to come back to the castle and not fight what was moving me closer to you anymore. That and a Gamla fruit."

We can't help but smile at the Gamla fruit taste we both associate with our relationship. That was real. No one can take that away.

"Does Albus know you're here?" I ask, thinking of Hogwarts as I seldom do here.

"Oh yes, one of your bird friends told one of his bird friends you were planning to off yourself."

This new coarse Harry will take some getting used to. "Wait, Dumbledore doesn't speak with animals."

"That phoenix of his, they seem to manage somehow," Harry says wryly.

"So you've been seeing Albus often?"

He starts for a moment. "We talk all the time. We were the ones who set up your business. You never talk about me with him?"

"No, he seemed reluctant to talk about you so I thought you didn't want to talk to me. Besides, I didn't want to press him. He's my only friend." We're staring at each other. "I thought he was my only friend."

"And he told me I should wait for you make the first move in re-establishing contact." Harry lights a cigarette anxiously. "I don't want to think that he would try to interfere in our relationship," he falters, his hand shaking while he inhales. "Dumbledore has been the only person I could trust since, since everything."

"You came to visit me when I was in the asylum," I say suddenly. "If you came to see me then, I should have known you might not mind a letter."

"Why does everything go wrong so fucking easily?" Harry's shout scatters a flock of gulls. "You could have killed yourself, hell, I've been in shitty shape myself. For what? So now the one person I could rely on is also the person who's making damn sure I stay miserable and alone?"

"We both need him so much and he's trying to do his best by both of us. It's not an enviable position." But it hurts a great deal that Albus would think I was so unsuitable for Harry to prevent us from getting in touch.

"Do you ever feel like Albus is a puritan at heart, and that he's always telling you to keep things quiet because he's not comfortable with strong passions?" Harry asks around a mouthful of smoke.

"He's often been a stabilizing influence for me, but yes, at times the calm is oppressive," I admit, never having put it to myself like that. "I've sometimes wondered what would have become of me if he were a little more sensitive to my need for support as a wizard who—er—loves other wizards."

"Say it, Severus. 'Gay.' Say, 'My name is Severus Snape and I am happy to be a gay man.'"

In a moment I twist him onto the ground. "If I do will you let me do something gay to you?"

He laughs and it is the best sound I have heard in years. "You have to man up and find out."

I shake my long hair out of my eyes with a practiced gesture and look down at his green eyes to say simply, "My name is Severus Snape and I am a gay man who wants to learn how to be happy."

I rub his face against my chest, against my belly, all the way to my groin. I'm swimming into him, back from the depths. I'm a sea creature, a merman, I have claws that rake through his hair and that turn back into hands so I can unbutton his shirt and then they are claws again. When I twist at his chest he gasps into my neck. I lick the strong muscles of his stomach and then I'm riding on top of the purple wave that is his body. He puts his hands on my waist and looks up at me with a look I can't place.

"What is it?" I whisper.

He sits up and mashes my mouth to his. The stubble scrapes me raw and he doesn't care. He unzips his pants and charms mine away.

"We can't– Let me get—"

He produces a packet of condoms. He remembered! He came to my house in the hope that—

He carries them about habitually for other reasons.

"I'm glad you are safe," I say stiffly.

"Shut the fuck up," he says and with another word we are together as if we were never apart. I gasp and he's drinking in the expression on my face. He must like what he sees because he's practically shattering my bones, like he's trying to rearrange my body so that he can stay forever. His hands are in my long hair, then they're brushing very lightly over my most sensitive zones.

"Don't do this to me," I groan.

"Tell me what you want," he growls. When I don't answer he tips me backwards so that we don't lose contact but I'm on my back. "If you don't know, or if you can't say it, I won't give it to you, that's for sure. What do you want?"

The two words are apparently descriptive enough.

I wrap my legs around him and pull his face down to mine. I have not been alive since the last time we did this. He stops what he was doing then moves to my neck. He's marking me, a love bite: the seagulls will be gossiping about it! He bites my lips and a sound grows in the shared space between our lips as our bodies' agreement becomes complete.

We lay there on the porch with the wind whipping over us and finally I tip his jaw over to mine so he's looking at me. "Don't say something terrible. Not now," he begs.

"I was just going to tell you that I'm Severus Snape and I'm a happy gay man."

He laughs and the hard look is gone. He feels for his cigarettes. "I'll put something in your tea and you'll stop this awful habit."

"I'll start a rumor that your potions are not quality-controlled," he says, exhaling with enjoyment.

After a few minutes I rub full-length against him like a cat. "Again?" he asks.

Suddenly I pull back. "No, you're right. That would be too much of a strain on your magic."

What Harry does to me then does not feel at all like a strain. Though it's not a configuration we've often made together, it feels so effortless that I don't even realize what's happening until it's over.

Panting, I lower myself to the ground. "Why did you do that?" I ask. "You could hurt yourself with repeated exposure."

"Because we can't do this halfway. I refuse to not be with the person I love the way I want to. This is your thing, Severus. You have one of the greatest minds in the wizarding world, and I don't think you've put one twentieth of the energy into figuring out how we can be together as you have in worrying about why we can't.

Maybe we only have sex every once in awhile, maybe I give up magic and you take care of me," he says with a new flirtatiousness that could strike a lesser man dead. "Maybe you infuse the magic back into me after you take it away. We'll figure it out. All I know is that I'm not alive by avoiding being with you. It's not working. So let's stop doing it."

At some point I realize my mouth is open and I close it.

Harry slaps my rear. "Come on, put on something nice."

"What?"

"Make yourself look pretty, there's something I've been waiting to do."

_Every like rejoices in his like: for likeness is said to be the cause of friendship, whereof many Philosophers have left a notable secret, Know you that the sour does quickly enter into his body, which may by no means be joined to another body,_

_And in another place_

_- The Mirror of Alchemy, composed by the famous Friar, Roger Bacon, sometime fellow of Martin College and Brasen-nase College in Oxenforde._

My lover critically ransacks my meager possessions until he finds something that will do and then he has me alter it with my magic until everything fits like it was tailor made.

"Since when do you know anything about clothes?"

"Since about five minutes ago when I realized I have someone to show off."

I plait my hair in several long braids and arrange them in the gypsy fashion wound at the nape of my neck. He gives me that look again. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

His man's arm drags me by the wrist all around the cottage, muttering, until he takes the tea-tray and holds it up. Aunt Adele looks back at us both, frowning. Harry tosses it aside and pulls me out on the porch. He leads me to the portkey.

"I'll show you," he says, pulling me close as we plummet into the Soho district where he has his flat.

Harry takes a shower and changes while I poke around. Hedwig looks cooped up and bored, so I let her out of the cage and we talk a little about Harry's habits. His loathsome diet is about to change for the better if I can help it. He plays quidditch on a weekender's team. He's taking an evening course of study at one of the Muggle universities—early childhood education? He has a job at the ministry but it sounds dull and far below his capabilities. His friends write but none of their magics are anywhere near this apartment.

The subject of our conversation comes from the shower with wet hair, wearing pants but holding the shirt in his hands. "Oh, I forgot, you two have been criticizing my eating habits, I bet."

We both blink at him owlishly. "Come here, Severus, I want you to help me save some money."

Mystified, I follow him into the bedroom. There is a box wrapped in expensive black embossed paper on the bed. There is a bit of dust on the velvet ribbon. "This looks like it cost you quite a bit."

"Open it," he commands, and stands there bare-chested and grinning.

The box opens and inside the satin paper are a corset, garters and stockings, all black. "You wouldn't believe the amount of money I've spent on therapy trying to get rid of these fetishes," he says. "It's nothing either of us would have chosen on our own; I see that now. But we're stuck with it. At least I am, having been an impressionable youth when the idea was introduced to me. Have mercy on me and join me in this dirty secret."

He is smiling, but I can tell he is anxious. When I begin unbuttoning my clothes he releases his breath. When everything is in place Harry wants to get the full effect with his eyes open and then he closes them and runs his hands over my new surfaces. In a second he's having me again. It is hard and fast and then we stare at each other, panting. "You don't mind, do you?" he asks, suddenly timid.

I kiss him and then put my clothes back on. "Where is this nice time you're going to show me?" I ask. "And let Hedwig out—she's bored."

He gets dressed quickly and pushes me out the door, taking a moment to register the leather and boning under my dark heather jacket and collarless dark gray shirt. "I've been wanting to do this for so long," he says, his voice catching as he locks the door.

We go to a restaurant not far away that seems to cater to a gay clientele. The waiter knows Harry and gives me a calculating glance. Harry ignores the looks we get from the muggles and we eat something simple and delicious, and drink wine. He kisses me over the table. "Now we're going to take a little walk."

We walk down the street. It's hard to believe —after everything, it's our first walk as a couple. His arm is around me. No one gives us a second look. It's bizarre.

Then I see where we're going—a particular telephone box. "Diagon Alley?" I protest. "Harry, they'll evacuate if 'the Alkahest' comes in their midst!"

He shrugs. "This is the night I've been waiting over four years for. Shut up and humor me." We appear on the street and he winds his arm firmly around me while lighting a cigarette. "Fancy a drink?"

He leads me to a new establishment that certainly wasn't there before—a bar catering to wizards who love—to gay wizards.

As if he knows what I'm thinking he stops. "What kind of bar is this?"

"A gay bar," I say obediently. "A gay wizard bar."

Here they also know Harry, and there are a few people who know me by reputation because their mouths hang open. He orders something, picks up our drinks and pushes me over to a booth that has magically opened up. This strange man who is somehow completely familiar pulls me onto his lap and clinks his glass with mine.

"This is not happening," I say, laughing a little breathlessly.

"Wait until we read about it in the Daily Prophet tomorrow," he observes with a knowing air. "Half the wizarding world can then tell you their version of this evening. Let's have ours." Harry runs his hands down my thighs. "Remind me to call my therapist and tell her she's fired." He is obviously as happy to be in this position as I am. "I've tried so hard to be doing anything other than what I'm doing right now. Everyone's been full of reasons why I shouldn't be doing exactly this. I've done what they say, and all I can say is that I haven't smiled. And now, with a miserable old git on my lap, this is the most alive I've felt in four years." He studies my face. "Though you look younger than I've ever seen you."

"Really? My system has changed a lot."

"You feel the same," he whispers. "I would have recognized you as Severus with my eyes closed."

We order another drink and toast wordlessly.

"I think right around this time yesterday you were giving me the dressing down of my life," I say, feeling more relaxed as Harry relaxes from all the alcohol. "Something about hearing all of those terrible things—which are true, by the way—helped me see that they weren't the only thing that was true."

He's looking a little tipsy himself. "I've put a flotation device in this corset so you can't drown yourself," he jokes. "But you have enough poisons to kill half of France. How can I feel good about letting you go back?"

My face goes blank. I wasn't really thinking about what would happen after tonight, and suddenly it all seems like Harry proving a point, and not the beginning of a future together.

We know each other too well for him not to guess what I'm feeling. "Do I have to slap you right here?" he asks, only half in jest. "Eventually you will not be in my direct line of sight, and I'm asking you if you actually need professional help."

I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him. "I think I am hopelessly neurotic but there's no real reason to spend our entire bondage wardrobe budget on therapy."

We hear a thump against the window. My guard is down—I didn't notice the gathering of magics outside! There are people pressing their faces against the glass trying to see. A murmur goes up from the crowd.

Harry's arm tightens on me. "This is going to get worse before it gets better. I refuse to live my life being controlled by others' stupidity."

Some people burst in from the street. "How can you let the Alkahest in here?" One woman cries.

"He'll steal your magic!" a man warns the clientele. The crowd grumbles and more people press in.

Harry stiffens and I can feel him reach for his wand. Then he pushes me off his lap. "This is really your fight."

Everyone at the bar is looking at me. Harry is looking at me. I walk very tall up to the bar. "Two of the same," I say and sit back down. When the pints are pulled I use wandless magic to levitate them over to our booth along with a few extra glasses. The people outside grow tired of watching me make our ale jump back and forth between the glasses like a fountain and into Harry's mouth. The moment is over.

"Well played." Harry's praise makes me blush. We drink several pints each just because we can—it's not something we could ever do together when he was a student—and then, leaning on each other, we walk out into the street.

This is my first time ever feeling drunk—that's how close my bond is with Harry. My system is attuning itself to his body chemistry as if to an organ that has been missing for too long and has now been fitted seamlessly into place.

"You've gotten incredibly handsome," I whisper to him and we lose ourselves for a moment.

"Alkahest! Unhand the boy!" someone shouts and a spark bounces harmlessly off my shield that has quite naturally wrapped around Harry.

"Rotten degenerate! You won't get my magic!" shouts someone else.

Doors are slamming right and left. I can feel wards going up—silly, easily sidestepped wards, but it's not like I want to be where I'm not wanted anyway. But this must be done.

The corset helps me stand completely straight. "My name is Severus Snape," I say in a voice that rings through the alley. "Please phrase all of your insults accordingly."

"All right, Severus Snape, they shouldn'ta let you out of Azkaban!" comes a Cockney voice.

"Severus Snape, they should have kept you in the asylum!"

"I wouldn't have my child taught by you, Severus Snape!"

"Wouldn't take one of your potions if you forced me to, Severus Snape, and we know how much you'd like that!"

It goes on for long minutes, during which I feel very little. If there's one thing my life has prepared me for, it's mass hatred. Harry stands by me glaring but letting me decide how to handle it. I hold up my hands and all the doors that had been slammed blow open and all the windows are lit up.

There is a silence.

"You can do better, Harry!" comes a voice from behind us. It must be from the gay bar, and Harry looks wounded. "With me!"

There are whoops and catcalls.

"I'd go straight for you, Harry," a witch shouts.

More screams and laughter from the bar crowd.

Harry and I hold hands and smile, listening to our attributes being good-naturedly debated by the bar denizens until the hostile crowd has its momentum dispersed.

"I love these people," he murmurs.


	33. Chapter 33

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 33: Revenge

Come, Harry." I pull his arm through mine. We walked to the telephone box and we're back in Muggle London.

"That was great!" Harry slurs, his adrenaline lowering enough for him to remember he's drunk. "I didn't know you could do all that."

"One of the reasons I've been in seclusion is that I am now frighteningly powerful." My inhibitions are lowered enough for me to tell him what I've been too ashamed to admit to anyone. "I don't like to think where it came from. I was changing tide patterns and wind gyres without knowing it before some of my animal friends pointed it out." He looks at me, surprised. "Harry, I could fly you from here to China and back with a movement of my little finger. And this power is sponsored by a thousand deaths. It's a lot to live with, and I hope one day you'll understand why I almost did what I did."

He's letting me into his flat and we sit heavily down on the bed. "I almost did it once. Found some pills that didn't go with alcohol and got frightfully sick." His eyes dare me to lecture him. "I just moved house—you should have felt the place where I was living most of these four years. I was the walking dead and it made the walls gray. The ministry gave me a paper-pushing job out of guilt."

"I was wondering why they didn't have you directing the aurors or something that would use your skills." I see that he is too drunk to hide his pride at my faith in him. "What made you decide to go to a muggle university?"

"Because I finally realized that most of you lot, while skilled at your branch of magic, were lousy teachers at Hogwarts!" he guffaws. "The teaching there is survival of the fittest. Where else can you get your hand eaten off by a carnivorous plant, then reattached after lunch, and it's all part of the experience?" He straightens up. "You know, you're a really good teacher when you try, Snape. The best. Too bad you were never able to teach that Shielding seminar. We needed more of that kind of stuff."

"Well, now I can't ever be around students because I am a pederast and a known magical solvent," I point out bitterly. "But living alone away from society did teach me how much I appreciate being outside and barefoot without having to change or suppress my magic."

Harry is looking at me quietly. "Of course, you have your business and everything. You know, no matter what they say, people would pay a hundred pounds for lemonade that had your label on it. They're fascinated and they know, deep down, how powerful you are."

"It is fortunate that I can put in a little work and get paid so handsomely for it," I agree, running my hand through his hair. His shoulders are tense. "But I've always wanted to go to university myself. You know I wasn't allowed to go because of my impediment."

"I wouldn't count on people changing their minds," Harry says sadly. "You heard them. If I'd known it was going to be that bad I wouldn't have pushed it so soon. Sorry, Sev."

The new nickname makes something quiver in a place I didn't know I had. "Muggles are handily quite oblivious to me," I continue, and suddenly my pants are halfway across the room. "I've come to quite appreciate muggle company. My father would never let me live that statement down." I chuckle and my hand directs his to where I want it to be.

Realization is beginning to dawn on him and he bounces up and down on the bed. "What would you study?"

"It all depends on what sort of credentials I can forge," I remind him. "Biomedicine would be closest, I suppose, though I'm interested in psychopharmacology just as much. I wonder what it would take to convince them I could keep up?"

He looks abashed. "I'm having to take tutorials to make up for the muggle things like calculus I never took."

"Unlike you, I can't teach children without frightening them half to death," my lips murmur against his ear. The purple magic is almost completely silent right now. Like many magical individuals living in muggle areas, he's rigged the apartment to use the existing appliances but run them on magic instead of paying for utilities. Now I have to use my magic to adjust the lights, to turn on the heat, to say the spells we need.

Harry's hands and lips are tracing my new textures over and over and over. He sees me watching and laughs. "You'll find my therapy was a resounding failure. I'm so glad I don't have to face this nice woman every week and tell her about the horrible playthings I'm compelled to buy. I need to cut costs to feed my habit."

"There's more?" I pant, wishing we could save the talk for later.

"Sev, I hope you're more vanilla than I am, because the older I get the more kink I seem to have, more than enough for the two of us." He pulls me up, swaying a little. "I wasn't going to show you this so soon." He opens a door I didn't realize was there.

My mind had filed it away as some kind of boiler room because it was so hot.

"Par la pierre philosophale et les six saints noms."

This clean-cut looking young Englishman has a collection of torture equipment worthy of the Marquis de Sade.

"The kind of guy who would come in here I wouldn't want in here," he whispers at my back. "You're sexy and cultured and smart and gentle and nobody like that would ever step foot in this room except you," and for a moment I'm amused at the way he describes me, "so you can't ever leave me again."

Harry's voice is contorted, a wreck of his normal voice.

"I scare myself. My therapist treats me like I'm a serial killer about to happen, and I'm afraid for it to get around what I'm really into, because I can't stop this, Severus, I've tried," he sobs, horrible man-sobs. "Don't leave me here in this room alone, I'm scared of being here alone with it," and he buries his face in my chest.

It takes but a breath for me to compose a neutral face, but inside I'm making bargains with a future Severus that I'll let him cry as much as he likes, that I'll let him throw boulders into the sea to express his outrage, anything if I can just preserve my calm for Harry now.

Up until this moment, I was sure I'd had the worst of it: Azkaban, my reputation ruined, three years in a psychiatric ward with Harry walking around the free hero of our kind.

Now I know that Harry has it infinitely worse.

I just want him, and whatever arouses him arouses me. But this. This is Voldemort's revenge. Me, I have to be careful I don't knock down buildings when I sneeze. My lover is carrying around the metastasizing filth of a madman.

"Ssh, Harry, love," he tips his head up at the word, sniffling. "I want to show you something." He follows my gaze to the wicked-looking battle axes. They melt into a puddle on the ground. A thick chain skitters into broken links. "Harry, I am now one of the most powerful men you will ever meet. Anything you do to me, I let you do. I'm not overly fond of knives, however," and they all shatter on the floor into glittering piles of dust.

Most of the things he can hurt himself with are destroyed. The handsome young face is gaping drunkenly at the piles of rubbish and then at me. While his guard is down seems like a good time to talk straight.

"Do you like having sex, Harry?"

He starts laughing that breathy laugh that makes me feel uncomfortable.

"Then this is how it's going to be. You're going to quit smoking, quit drinking except for special occasions, eat the diet I prescribe, take every potion I offer you, and begin a training regimen to strengthen your physical and magical makeup. I, for my part, will begin searching for ways to minimize my effect on you."

He opens his mouth.

"Lift your arms above your head," I order.

He tries and then slumps into my arms.

"If you want to be anywhere but a hospital bed for the majority of our relationship, we start working hard now. You do agree to the investment, Mr. Potter?" and I clap my hand over my mouth.

Without realizing it, I've been talking to him with the condescending sneer I used when I was his instructor. "I don't know where that—"

"And what happens if I don't do what you say," he asks, and I want to say that he could die, but he adds mischievously, "Professor Snape?"

He's looking at me with the most erotic combination of innocence and a knowing kind of flirtation, and something in me breaks. "Potter, I'll show you to respect your elders," I snarl. Hermes, it's been ages since I've had a good snarl.

"Wait, wait," he says, dragging himself to his feet. I follow and he's digging some robes out of his closet. We shrug into them breathlessly and continue the game. It turns out that Harry used to think about me punishing him, and I am more than happy to punish him for any number of infractions from the past. I have him over my knee and the bitterest insults are welling to my lips but he keeps ruining it by running his lips over my tongue.

The Slytherin Creed never meant anything to me until I force Harry to recite it under certain circumstances.

It must have been Harry's and my combined inventiveness that we enjoyed so much in our dreams after all. That was ours. This is ours.

He falls asleep quickly and I'm not in the habit of sleeping but one, or, at most two, hours a night, so I decide to forgo rest so that I can take care of some things.

Hedwig is happily dispatched with a message to Dumbledore. I apparate back to my house and quickly brew a couple of potions and leave them to cool while I gather up some clothing, a few books and some other prepared compounds.

By the time I am back in England there is a message waiting for me from Albus. It takes quite some time to comb and dry my hair from the shower, but it is mostly finished by the time Harry finally awakens. He doesn't see me in bed and I can see the panic in his face. A steaming mug of my patented tonic nudges his hand, and he relaxes. "This doesn't taste so bad—don't tell me what's in it."

He finally notices the conflict on my face. "Come back to bed. It's Sunday."

My hand steals over to him to resume its cataloguing of all the changes in his body it missed, and I smite it. "There's nothing I'd rather do, but I don't want to make things look any worse for Albus."

"What? Is he coming?" Harry gathers all of the things he wouldn't want our elderly friend to see and shoves them in the closet.

At least he can stand.

"No, Harry I don't think Albus ever wants to be in the same room with me again. He's gotten very frail after all of the scandal and ugliness he went through with my trial. I wouldn't permit him to come even if he offered—the risk of my absorbing even a little of his magic is too great." But for some reason I think nothing of exposing my lover.

Harry has leapt across the room and tackled me onto the bed before I can realize it. He really is inside my shield. "You do seem better," I manage when I have use of my mouth.

"So I was a little drunk last night. I'm fine now. Let me show you."

"Harry." I push him off with a little too much force and he whacks his head against the mattress. "Sorry, I'm still not used to this strength. We have two hours until Albus pokes his head in, and I'd really like to show him that he can be happy, instead of worried, about us."

Harry looks at the magical apparatus I'm setting up. "Pomfrey used to use that in the infirmary."

"Yes, I've always kept one in my equipment but have never felt comfortable using it. It's bonded magic passed on by a healing guild, so Madam Lessmore could only explain by example. Casting the Philosopher's trident, as they call it, is a diagnostic tool and indispensible if I'm going to learn how to stop absorbing your power."

Harry makes some tea and sips it with a casual air while I set up the mechanism and cast the spell.

He sets down his teacup.

We look in silence for a few minutes. There is nothing to say. His magic is a tiny puff of purple, still being drawn towards me. When I step into the trident area I am all shot through with purple. His nose starts bleeding as if on cue. I fetch the tissues from the bathroom and we stare at the red standing out accusingly on the white.

I try a few incantations and scatter a few powders into the triangle. Harry begins to glow a little brighter, and I urge him to concentrate on this light while I try to mentally adjust my own magic to stop pulling at his. We make a small amount of progress and I smash a lamp with my mind I'm concentrating so hard.

"Hogwarts has a very complex system of wards to keep this from happening," my words are meant to reassure me as much as him, "So we know it is possible for us to be in the same room while only a minimal amount of magic transfers from you to me. Intimacy is another matter, but I want Dumbledore to walk us through some of the things he's done in the past."

"That's why he's stopping by?" Harry jumps out of the trident to find a shirt.

A whole array of liquid potions and tablets are lined up next to two salves on the coffee table when he emerges from the bedroom. "That, and I don't want to feel like we're hiding from him at all. I sent Hedwig out for the Daily Prophet. There's undoubtedly some ghastly story about us and it's best that we give him our version right away."

He's stoically throwing back the potions, one of which tastes so vile he has to choke back a retch. "Sorry," I mouth at him, but he does look visibly better.

"I like that we have an 'our version,'" he says shyly and then Albus's head pops up the chimney.

"I trust this is a good time," he says looking to a wild-haired Harry in his pajama bottoms with his shirt draped around his neck and me fully dressed in a plum heather blazer and slacks with my hair still hanging loose.

We all look at each other a moment. We don't need to speak to establish several things: that we are two of the people Albus cares most about, that he will stand by us no matter what, and that he would give anything for us not to be together.

Harry pulls me down to the couch and holds on to me with all his limbs like a monkey. I run my hands through his hair and we both look at Albus. He sighs. "Your first 24 hours together have already caused quite a fuss," he says.

I fetch the newspaper and we all laugh together over "the Alkahest indulges his dark appetites with the hero of the Wizarding World," and the "plans for group assignations that were made in public with the denizens of an unsavory establishment," that I had Harry "completely under the Imperius curse, as evidenced by his doting expression," and that I committed burglary by opening up the doors of shuttered businesses.

"That last was true!" Harry exclaims. "'Kindly address your insults accordingly,'" he drawls in a spot-on imitation of my voice.

"We know it's not a laughing matter, but I think we're going to have to maintain some sense of humor," I qualify to Albus' worried face. He's paid a high price for Harry and me to be together, and we have no right to demand his continued support for a relationship he thinks is unhealthy, but there he is, with his head in the chimney.

Harry's conflicted emotions about our dear friend are rolling hot off his skin, so I offer to pick up some fresh bread and milk so they can have a chance to talk. When I come back I'm relieved to see that Harry has forgiven Albus his deception in the name of keeping us apart—Harry's glare is now dedicated at me. "You know, I just realized that there never was a fireplace in my flat," he says. "You explain it to the landlady, then."

And then we get to work trying out some wards. For some I consult my magical references, and for others Albus has me repeat after him. It's not the best way to do magic, but I can feel something happening, and Harry is able to lift a feather with his wand. The old wizard and I then have a rapid-fire conversation about ways he can strengthen his system in technical terms that totally lose Harry, so he prepares fresh tea and breakfast. We eat while planning a daily regimen when suddenly Dumbledore stops in mid-sentence.

Harry and I are running our bare feet over each other under the table, he's got an unbuttoned shirt over his pajamas, my hair is flowing all around, and we're taking turns feeding each other bits of bread with a jam I made myself from wild seaberries.

"Oh, Merlin, Albus, if you could only try this jam," Harry moans, licking his fingers. "Sev is brilliant with cooking as well as potions. And most things actually." He kisses me a little longer than is polite in company, and then drops his napkin so he can quickly run a hand over my garters.

The old man looks at me and he's reminding me of his message earlier this morning. That if Harry gets too sick he'll intervene, no matter how happy we are. And intervention at this point, with the public ready to burn me at the stake, could come very dear.

Harry starts on his routine and doesn't complain about much, though I can tell he's still sneaking cigarettes. The remedy I'm giving him is extremely effective, so hopefully he will quit soon. His system can't afford the strain. But my new-old lover is doing the mental and physical exercises and seems grateful for the structure.

He only makes it through two days at work before it becomes impossible.

The first day the Savior of Wizarding-kind has a hard time getting through the sensors because they don't register enough magic. When a guard lets him through, he claims to have anemia, which is close enough to the truth, but of course everyone has read the news and thinks it's my fault.

They're right.

This new happy demeanor he's wearing is disarming compared to his usual glum expression, so Harry manages to charm them through some of the side effects of his weekend.

The second day some paper comes across his desk about new security measures related to "undesirable elements" and referring to the threat posed by "magical contagions."

Harry Potter courageously explains why such legislation is dangerous and also based upon misinformation, and he's sent home and told to take a leave of absence to get his priorities in order.

"My father worked at the Ministry," this man who is somehow mine says quietly, coming back to me re-warding his flat from the bottom up. "I'd hate to burn my bridges there just because they're caught up in this mass hysteria. Don't we have a bill of rights or something?"

"Yet another area where the muggles have something to teach us," I point out, trying so hard to make my magical presence smaller I actually shrink to the size of a mouse.

"Sev! That's so cool!" And deviant that he is, Harry asks me to resize myself until I'm a bit shorter than him for a change.

"You can't, Harry, we're trying to build up your strength," I protest, but since he's now the tall one it doesn't seem any harm to play at what it might be like to be smaller and weaker.

Our sensual repertoire grows larger by the day.

I cast the trident while he's drowsing. The magic isn't rushing towards me, more like trickling. That's a little progress. I still haven't stopped whipping myself for costing him his ministry job.

"Harry?" he frowns that I'm interrupting his nap. "Love?" he smiles with his eyes closed. "Mon cœur et mon—" He's got his mouth on mine. "Harry, be serious. I have some errands to take care of" he pulls away "related to our plans to go to school together and your health. I've been making some inquiries and there is much to do. How would you feel about ten days' absence—" His face goes hard. "And then a week's holiday in France with me?"

This does something for him no tonic could ever do—it brings back something, not the child, but something else, hope, perhaps, that he lost along the way.

"We can see the places you showed me in our dreams," he says, eyes shining. "Will we be traveling in magical circles or with muggles?"

"A bit of both. I have a whole programme in the works."

"You know I've traveled very little, and mostly popping in and out of boring Ministry offices by portkey." He's a little breathless, and I fear it's not just from excitement. His arms are not squeezing me as tightly as they did this morning.

"Promise me you will do everything you can to build up your strength in my absence. If you don't Hedwig will tell me. And let her out occasionally. Hermès! What a way to treat a friend!"


	34. Chapter 34

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 34: The Journal

While Harry was hopefully resting for ten days, I didn't stop moving. Of course bringing my lover to my quasi-homeland was sure to be meaningful, and I desperately look forward to getting lost in his company away from the complications of Britain. But one of my many motivations behind the trip was to get him away from that torture chamber. It beat against the edge of my consciousness once he showed it to me, and I did vomit and cry and yell as soon as I got back to the privacy of my cottage.

I told some of the birds, and they listened with wide eyes and wished me luck on my new dual purpose in life: I wanted to discover what would cure Harry of this affliction, and also what would strengthen him to withstand my own condition. Like the good friends they are, some of the Snubnosed Gallic kestrels told me about a few wise men and women they'd heard of around Europe, people who might be able to help me in my quest.

A few of them I'd be able to track down during my touring with Harry, the rest I put on a list and sent to Albus for advice. At any given time I had several experiments going trying to figure out how to stop merging with Harry's magic; there was always a new potion on the boil; and I was trying out my still less-than-instinctual self-transfiguration skills with the help of the birds, for lack of a reflection.

And I was traveling. Apparating and then hovering invisibly at various research institutions, universities and hospitals, trying to discern what I should study and what I needed to fake credentials. There was no way I could fake a good bedside manner, so pretending to be a regular doctor was out.

I'm not really accustomed to touching anyone other than Harry, so I don't know that I could bring myself to place a stethoscope on someone's chest. It was interesting to watch them work, however, The muggle psychiatrists made me laugh rather obviously a few times. They know so little and presume so much, and after my mother and then my own long stay in an institution, I only lasted 15 minutes in the psychiatric ward before I ran out and found a place to splash water on my face. It's probably the same atmosphere the world over.

I tried watching researchers work but of course I had no idea what they were peering at in their microscopes and my lack of acquaintance with technology was a serious drawback.

Then I stumbled upon some of the more experimental branches of investigation. The pharmacologist-slash-botanists looking for new medicines in rare plants. The neurologists and brain researchers trying to isolate the chemical and electrical clues associated with different states of consciousness. In both of these areas I could make an extremely impressive showing—I'd actually have to learn how to downplay what I know, which is still so bloody little.

Then there are doubtless many shamans around the world who would have much to teach me about controlling my own problem and treating Harry's—if only I can convince them to talk to me.

Though I don't need much sleep, I felt constantly oppressed by the feeling that whatever I was doing, I should be doing ten other things instead.

Albus and I stuck our heads into each other's hearths very often, and it gave me a chance to see how his health is—by letter he always said he was fine. The aftermath of my imprisonment and madness, and Harry's decline, had aged him visibly. He is now the headmaster of Hogwarts mostly in name only, with Minerva taking over most of the daily annoyances and him mainly sitting back and listening to the magic of the castle, making a minor adjustment in the symphony that must be so different now that Harry and I—the ones who needed so much of his protection—are gone.

When Harry's not there and he doesn't have to remember the reason for Severus Snape's new lease on life, the old self-congratulatory Dumbledore is back. He is full of good ideas about narrowing my search for a school, and he makes some discreet inquiries about how far "the Alkahest's" infamy has stretched.

"I'm glad that you're on my side, Albus," I tell him as part of our long-running joke. "You could probably get me elected Prime Minister of Muggle Britain, couldn't you?"

He looks thoughtful. "Britain would be difficult, but most other countries…" He laughs, and I can see he's happy to be needed again, in the thick of intrigue again.

London has never seemed so alive as when I apparate a few streets away from Harry's apartment so that I can savor the anticipation in those few steps:

Someone is waiting for me.

Harry and I only have a few moments to grope each other before Albus joins us at the new fireplace. Annoyed, Harry doesn't hide the hand he has on my thigh.

"Severus and I have been discussing your academic futures," the old wizard begins.

"Really?" Harry's about to lunge into the coals to throw his arms around Dumbledore's fiery neck.

The old man and I exchange a pleased look that the young man we care about so much is taking an interest in the scheme, and I pick up the thread. "Britain and Ireland are both very dangerous—if anyone recognizes me there with you it would mean a lengthy and very ugly public uproar, the beginning of which we've already seen in the papers." Harry's head is sinking into his hands. "But there are a few options."

"Polyjuice is one possible route, though in the long-term it's something of a gamble, especially at the high doses his special constitution requires," Dumbledore continues. "Severus makes the best Polyjuice in the world, and even he can't guarantee that there won't be some flickers now and again over the course of several years of study."

"Several years?" Harry lifts up his head. "I don't want to walk around school with some bloke, I want to walk around with Severus. I don't want to touch some random man."

He's getting very upset, and no matter how we try to reassure him that I could take the antidote once I got home, Harry is deeply disturbed by the idea and has his arms grasped tight around my waist.

Dumbledore sighs and looks away. "It depends on constant concentration, but there is the transfiguration option."

"But Sev is terrible at transfiguration," Harry says automatically, scowling at the old wizard.

I tip his face toward me and he jumps a foot in the air. "Merlin, don't ever do that to me with no warning again!" He's staring at my transfigured form and he's shaking. I try to stroke his arm and he leaps off the bed. "Don't put those strange hands on me—I don't know you, fuck you."

Tears are coursing down his hard face. I transfigure back to my own form and Harry punches me over and over again while he sobs.

The older wizard and I look at each other guiltily. We shouldn't have surprised him. This reaction is only a hint of what he went through before I returned to his life, and I feel very guilty for imagining a bunch of affairs with attractive men for him. Harry is completely sexually traumatized, and I'd do well to remember it.

My hand is still stroking his hair soothingly. "A compromise just occurred to me. Close your eyes, mon tresor, and let me take your spectacles," I coax.

For once, Albus's eyes give me leave to say or do whatever I want. We have a quick consultation about magical optics and then the spell is cast. When I look through his glasses it seems to have worked.

Harry flinches when I put my hand on him, and I detest how that makes me feel. Par la Rose-croix, let this be right. "I'm putting your spectacles back on you, but don't open your eyes until I have a chance to move away." He nods and I move to the other corner of the room. "Open your eyes."

He blinks at me, scowling. "Why you thought that was funny, Severus, I have no idea," he starts.

"Take off your glasses, Harry," the wizard prompts.

Harry does so and is practically under the bed. "Get out of my fucking bedroom, you bastard," he says.

"It's me, Harry, put your glasses back on." He does and calms immediately.

"Can you live with the idea that everyone else is seeing Severus with another form?" Dumbledore asks.

Harry is pulling me back towards him so he can make sure it's really me, and Dumbledore averts his gaze when the investigation gets very thorough. "You feel like you, as well. Why is that?" Harry whispers.

"I don't think my body can tell you anything but the truth," I whisper back.

There is the sound of a throat clearing from the grate.

"As long as I can see you and touch you—the real you—everyone else can go fuck themselves," Harry pronounces. "Promise me—"

"I will never do that again," I don't hide my pain at what I unwittingly brought to the fore. And it's time again to avert my gaze and bargain with the future Severus Snape who will weep and curse Voldemort's soul into a deeper part of hell. "But that solves one problem."

"There are some places Severus and I have been looking into that can meet both of your schooling needs." Our visitor lists places all over Europe as well as Morocco and America. "America has the most choice of schools, but it is also far away." What Dumbledore doesn't say is that we couldn't just pop into each others' fireplaces so easily. Certainly the aged man would have a hard time using any of the wizard communication methods available. "But then there is the language barrier in most other places."

"I could use a Rosetta Ring," Harry suggests, but we point out that it's nearly impossible to hide and muggles wouldn't be able to understand the magical item. "Well then, I'll learn a new language."

I kiss his cheek and murmur something dirty to him in a dozen languages using the silky voice he understands very well. Harry has never shown an interest in languages other than Parseltongue, but if he's willing to learn he has the best teacher he could have.

"Then you must decide which language you wish to learn," Albus says patiently. This room has provided the most man-on-man action he's witnessed in his life, and he's from a much more prudish generation. I'll have to remind Harry not to paw me so obviously in front of our 150-year-old friend.

"I want to go to France, of course," comes Harry's choice. "Is that far enough away?"

It's all I can do to keep from attacking him in front of Albus. The old wizard made me promise that Harry would make all the major decisions about our future so as not to be deprived of any more of his youth, so I've had to wait before taking any positive steps. The impossibility of fitting all of France into the itinerary for our one-week holiday has shown me how much I'd love to live there, but I kept my word and didn't influence Harry either way. "With me transfigured, I hope so," and we all talk about various schools and courses of study. We should be able to make some visits during the next week, or perhaps we'll extend our stay further.

"How did you pick this face?" Harry asks suddenly. "You still can't see your reflection, can you?"

Albus looks at me quizzically. "I hadn't thought about that complication. How do you know you look like someone specific, and how will you reproduce it every day? Maintaining a stable transfiguration as another human is very strenuous for everyone, including those most gifted at that art."

Harry is shooting me hateful looks, suspecting this is the body of a former lover.

I move over to the corner of the room. "Take off your glasses and I'll tell you," I say. He does so, scowling. "Harry, Albus, meet my father, Augustus Snape." Their jaws drop open simultaneously.

"I had no idea—" Dumbledore says.

"Merlin's beard, your father was hot!" Harry yells and then looks vaguely guilty.

Now it is my turn to gape. "My father was not hot, as you say. He was much worse to me than his limitations would have required. You can call him a bastard to this face and I won't disagree with you. We can do it together, if you like."

Harry sidles up to me and peers at me with his uncorrected vision. Now I shrink away. "You will avoid coming on to my father's body while I am wearing it," I hiss and Dumbledore still looks ill after the glasses are back in place. "My father was one of the only men I've been around long enough for his body to be easy for me to reproduce," I tell them both. Of course, I could have reproduced James or Sirius more easily, but that would have really traumatized Harry. "And thank you for reminding me that I do, in fact, take after my Aunt Adele and not my mother, who was very beautiful,"

"You're beautiful, Severus," Harry says in a hurt tone, and Albus takes his leave hurriedly. My lover takes off my clothes piece by piece and then stops. "Make yourself go back to normal," he says, his body all in a knot suddenly. I do and take off his glasses. He peers at me and then returns to his seduction.

We haven't gotten reacquainted since my ten-day absence, and he discovers the new garter and stockings I bought, the now-tighter corset which he runs his hands over mumbling something. "I need to start learning French immediately. I don't have enough ways to swear," he says.

My lover is discovering the little things I have brought back to evoke some of the details in our early, decisive, counterfeit fantasies. I can feel his magic purple and bright staining my own with a passion sharper than the last time and resolve not to let the purple into my matrix.

"You know just what I like," he says with something like anguish as his hands close on the baubles. "You are just what I like."

He is rough and reverent. His blood is hot as fire, his muscles are the strong cords binding the earth together, his breath comes in gasps of air against my face, and I am water water water water water water stained with purple—

No, don't think that, don't feel that, don't let him dissolve—

My attention is divided between enjoying Harry and trying to concentrate on not taking anything from him in the process. But then he's s kissing all over my face and saying, "I love you love you love you" while I'm focusing on not latching on to the connection that opens like a vein rich with our climax.

Of course, that takes every ounce of will I have and distracts me from saying anything back, and he looks at me worriedly. "I shouldn't have said that so soon," Harry begins, and I am considering whether I should set up the medicinal trident now or wait. "You don't have to say anything back."

Cursing myself for focusing on the wrong thing always, I pull him to me. "You really need to learn French," I say. "What do you think I've been saying to you since you came back into my life? Since you came into my life at all?" And I translate for him the things that I've been murmuring into his sleeping ears, the things that I said into his mind back when we were dreaming together at Hogwarts.

"What is mon tresor?" he asks.

"That was my mother's very special name for me when I was very, very good," I say. "My treasure."

He winds himself around me and plays with my hair while one tear runs down his cheek. "Do you think it's normal that we cry all the time together?" he asks.

My laugh doesn't quite come off right. "Normal is something we've never seen separately so I doubt if we will see it together. But one thing we will be seeing tomorrow is France."

He is about to say something but he's drifting off to sleep with a smile. When he's safely unconscious I summon the magical trident and cast the diagnostic spell. I stupidly forgot to cast one when I first arrived, but I think his magic still looks very strong after being away from me for ten days, and the connection between us is only trickling.

In the morning we go by portkey to Antibes since Harry has trouble apparating over large bodies of water, as most wizards do. He can't find enough words to say how beautiful the light is in France. How good everything tastes. How something as simple as a wooden bench or a piece of cloth feels more solid, more real.

Over lunch he eats whatever I put in front of him and I allow him one small glass of wine, his first alcohol in ten days. At first I think it's just happiness to be drinking when he bursts out laughing and laughs until he cries.

"Over half, over half," he gasps. "Over half the people we've seen have Notable Noses like yours," and he takes off his glasses to wipe his eyes and sees my father sitting there with his prototypical English nose. Harry jumps. "You said you wouldn't!" he cries.

"What are we doing in France but trying to establish my new identity?" I say in a voice only he can hear. "I'm sorry, love, but I really thought you understood."

He nods and composes himself. It occurs to me that all I have to do is use that word—love. What in the hell would have happened to him if some repulsive man got a hold of him and told him he loved him? Oh wait, maybe he did.

"My nose is not Notable," I say, to lighten the mood. "It is Distinguished. And it looked a damn sight worse on my aunt."

For our entire stay in France I have to listen to him compare my nose to other people, while I'm juggling a thousand different agendas. There are two schools to look at, there are all of Harry's potions to keep track of, the daily magical exercises and also he's taken up jogging again. I'm trying to track down a very obscure Vietnamese magician who took up residence in some cave or other in this country during the war and never returned. There are potions contacts to make in my Snape form, and then I am trying to find out more about the history of Alkahests in Brittany.

So perhaps it's to be expected that we would end up in the hospital on our seventh night.

But on our second afternoon Harry gets up from where we're sitting under an umbrella on the beach. "Do you want to go back in?" I ask.

"No, you stay, I just need to walk around."

I had noticed that Harry was getting a little fidgety. "Breaking your promise about quitting smoking just means prolonging the agony of withdrawal," is my testy reply.

Harry's face is conflicted and he doesn't snap back at me the way I would respect. Slowly, he withdraws a small object from his pocket. "Since you already assume the worst about me, you want to look, then look," he says, slouching back in his chair with his arm crossed.

Surreptitiously I resize the item until it's a standard-sized artist's sketchpad. "Why would you feel the need to hide something like this from me?"

"It's part of my therapy, okay?" he answers sullenly. "It's the standard practice for someone who's really fucked up. You're supposed to keep a journal about your feelings, but you know I hate to write, so it was either this or some type of needlecraft."

"There is a long and illustrious tradition of storytelling through tapestry-making in our culture," I comment mildly, and feeling very nervous for some reason I open to a random page.

It's a picture of Harry with his two best friends sitting at a table in what must be the tavern at Hogsmeade. They're drinking butterbeer, but more properly this picture is depicting the very beginning of the love affair between Ron and Hermione. I can see clearly the nascent romance, and Harry's deep affection for the two of them as they discover in each other what he had seen for so long.

The next drawing I flip through is from the point of view of flying after a snitch, yet absent from the drawing are both a broom and a snitch. I recognized the tilted landscape of Hogwarts, but I feel confident that even a muggle would be able to vicariously participate in this thrilling moment, as I never did before now, being fatally unathletic as I am.

"It's not like they move or anything. I tried to find out how you can cast the charms that will animate drawings, but I guess they don't just give those out to anyone. You have to apprentice with someone and I don't think I'd find a master that would take me on since this is just an assignment for me."

The first picture I saw was actually unusual, in that there wasn't some important part implied but missing. The next image that meets my eyes causes a pang in my tongue. It depicts just one bed from an angle, but anyone would be able to tell that it's one among a row of identical infirmary beds. There's a glass on the bedtable closest to the foreground, and I recognize the color of the Dreamless Sleep Harry took so often for nightmares. Though it's from his frequent experience of illness, it reaches some kindred place in me with all the febrile tedium a sick person experiences, that I felt many times with my lolling tongue and my arm trying to push out the IV needle.

I can feel Harry waiting for my reaction, but I keep turning the pages and looking at each for a long time. There's one that makes my heart swell with pride: it's from the point of view of Harry walking into the Senior Ball with Edgar Singh on his arm. One wouldn't need to know any of the context to be able to feel the significance of the moment mirrored in the faces of the students in dress robes: surprise, friendliness, and best of all, a disinterest that shines with a kind of wondrous, hard-won normalcy.

More pictures come into view and I start trying to touch them, because they seem as though they're cleverly-engineered wizard pictures that have a tactile spell to them. But these are charcoal. Or pen-and-ink. And unlike magic pictures, they don't move. But that knowledge doesn't change the fact that they practically have me by the throat with their emotions.

That's why I can't look at a picture of the Minister of Magic, who Harry must have seen often at his job. It's as though the artist were at war with his feelings about this man, and it looks like shards of a person that don't fit together. Either that, or that's the vision Harry has of this calculating man.

The picture drawn from Harry's perspective as he testified in court is too painful and I pass by it quickly.

My mind is too busy piecing something important together: Harry is a young man with a heroic life. He could have easily drawn his many battles, or some of the more picturesque parts of the Wizarding world. Yet, there's nothing in these sketches that really signals their origin as being specifically magical. Rather, he chooses ordinary things and makes you really look at them.

My eyes growing moist, I flip to one of the most recent drawings.

Aunt Adele.

Harry saw her in the tea tray at my seaside home, but it was only a glimpse. Otherwise, people have always told me that they can see my actual face reflected in mirrors. He's heard about her so often, though, that this quick look was enough to provide the basis for this—there's no other word for it—this phenomenon.

Aunt Adele is pictured in a stuffy parlor that, if not identical in details to the one from my childhood, is very similar in feeling. She's sitting very straight, as she always did, and her severe pulled-back hairstyle sets off her igneous features that seem to float above the black robe. She looks ridiculous. Arrogant and cruel. Except for her hands.

Her hands: he's captured that thing her hands did. At once they have an unfortunate palsy, and at the same time one hand is petting the other like a cat. And the wonder of it all is that it's impossible to entirely hate this woman. She looks passionately lonely, and in this one instance, Adele has attained that majesty of my grandmother's that allowed her to carry off the family nose in the way my aunt and I could not.

"Shut up! Give it here if you're going to make fun." Only with Harry's sharp words do I realize I'm laughing.

It's That Laugh that is wheezing out of my throat. It's huge, it's too huge what Harry has done without caring about what he was doing.

Elbowing him aside, I flip to the last drawing. It's a picture of a house elf. The ornery little things would normally only cause a wave of revulsion in me, but it's looking at me with the most noble of expressions, and I—

"For Merlin's sake, Severus, I'm never going to share anything personal with you again."

He stalks off with his sketch pad under his arm, kicking up indignant explosions of sand as he goes.

Harry's art has the power to change deep-seated opinions, like mine about house elves. What could be more magical than that?

I give him a few moments' head start while I pack up our towels and things. By the time I'm back to the room he's smoking on the balcony, and doesn't turn around when he hears me come out to join him.

"So glad I could provide some entertainment," says the Harry version of my nasty voice. It feels terrible to be on the receiving end, especially because it is undeserved.

Leaning on the balcony rail, I try to find the words. "Harry, you—"

"Don't fucking start with me. I don't want to hear your version of all the things you see that prove everything that's wrong with me. I should never have let you see."

"That's all your therapist gets out of those drawings is some reflection of pathology?" He stares at my shocked tone. "Medical people are not known for their imaginations, but

this practitioner must be made of stone. It makes me want to have a word with her, filling up your head with nonsense."

"What are you talking about? She just looks at them and says keep it up, mostly. I should have taken the magical crochet class; less demeaning and more useful. You can make these doilies that will float your drink to you."

Carefully, I move Harry's shoulders so that he's facing me. "What you showed me was not the artistic equivalent of a doily. Harry Potter, you have a Bequest."

He snorts. "I was only created for one purpose and that was for going into battle. You don't see any baddies anywhere, do you?" We look out to the sunny and luxurious coast of France. "Well, then, whatever else I do isn't going to rise far above doily-making, I'm afraid. So get used to being with mediocrity."

I can't help it, I shake him a little. "Will you just shut up for a minute and listen?" And feeling déjà vu like mad, I tell him the story of the Bequest (my mother's version, naturally).

His face is softening but is still hard, so I add in the circumstances in which my mother told it to me—discovering the mathematics of perfumes and being told I was unnatural.

"Before I met you, Sev, I thought my family won the prize," he says and puts my arm through his. We're leaning over the balcony at this place that miraculously has nothing against us, and I tell him how it reminds me of the picture from his Senior Ball.

"Huh, I guess that's what I was thinking. I don't really think about anything, to be honest. I hate to admit it but my mental patient drawing time is kind of important to me. Do you mind if I go somewhere for a while? I promise I won't smoke."

"Anything you want, mon tresor."

Harry leaves for his sketching, and I burst into tears.


	35. Chapter 35

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 35: Art and Artistry

We are walking through some shops the next day, debating over possible presents for Albus, and I can see him peering over his glasses at my father's face.

"If you don't stop that I'm going to turn into Aunt Adele and you'll have to live with that face just on the other side of your spectacles for the next several years."

"Don't! She's scary," Harry says. Then he looks thoughtful. "You can be a girl? Would you want to?"

"Do you want me to?" I ask, surprised.

"No! Please don't. That's too strange for me. Promise me you never will," he begs.

"I reserve the right to turn into anything if it will help me get away from an angry mob," I say dryly, ashamed to admit I've thought quite a bit about the possibility of a mob getaway. "But I won't short of that."

He's looking at me strangely. "You can really be anyone?"

A look comes across Harry's face that chills me to the marrow. He's looking at me from the point of view of his perversions—how he can shape me into them, things otherwise forbidden he might be able to get away with using my new transfiguration power.

It's like I'm looking at Voldemort in a sunny market in the South of France.

We walk around and I let Harry buy Albus whatever he wants—a small watercolor from a street artist and a box of bonbons. Smoothly I mention, "By the way, I have some potions contacts to meet in Wizarding Paris. These are some low-lifes from the wrong side of the tracks, magically speaking. I think we might want to keep my reputation as a lone wolf in that world."

Harry is about to protest. "These chaps might think they could get a price for the hide of the Boy Who Lived," I add, not entirely in jest.

He shivers. "Fine, I want to wander around. Maybe email Hermione and Ron."

We've agreed that he is to be vague as to his whereabouts but stay in contact with people to prove he's all right. Albus and I are both concerned that Harry has withdrawn so much from his friends.

In my Severus Snape form I apparate to Paris and the rogue's gallery that is The Corsair, a place where drink and contraband from around the globe can be had at all hours.

The people are very much the same as always, variations on eternal types: one has a pet sloth he carries on his shoulder as a familiar. Another has the irksome habit of switching faces every five minutes because he's constantly on the run from the law or doing something he doesn't want to be remembered for. There are dealers in rare intoxicants and magical artifacts. Conjurers like my grandmother who can make anything for a price. And then there are potions experts like myself. Come to buy, come to sell.

The fact that I am now "The Alkahest" is treated as if it is a marketing ploy to increase my infamy and thus my fee, the way Francois in the far corner was for a time called "The Necromancer" as a way to excuse his access to shipwrecks and the heirlooms of the dead that were actually acquired by different black magics.

Though I scarcely receive any direct looks at all, I am thoroughly looked over from head to toe within 30 seconds of walking through the door. All of my new power aside, they could each kill me in six different ways without batting an eyelash.

The fact that these scoundrels are just like old times makes me want to kiss each scabby man as the only things constant from my old life.

We haggle for form's sake and I make a show of checking to see if my drink is poisoned because they don't need to know that the superior quality of my potions is due to my gift—otherwise they might try to cut off my hand to see how far they could get with it. They all agree to move some of the more legally questionable compounds I can prepare, and the payment I ask for from many of them is in kind.

They say they'll try to find the rare ingredients I need and we part ways, me with a rare spring in my step. Someone throws a dagger at my back and I turn it to water before it hits my shield.

It's good to have people you can count on.

When I return to Antibes later that night, Harry is nervous. "I'm sorry, Sev, I didn't mean to upset you about saying you were going to be a girl," he says. "I'm glad you're a boy. I like boys. I've always liked boys."

The perennial question of whether or not this is true, or merely more conditioning from Voldemort, is handily pushed back down to the depths of my mind.

"When I started seeing my Aunt Adele as my reflection when I was 15, you can imagine that questions arose." It seems safer to avoid the true reasons for my upset. "I have a present for you."

A shadow of lust flicks across his face. He's expecting some BDSM treat. I smile neutrally and hand him the package.

His face clears up into a child's expression of wonder. "I've never used one," he breathes. "This is like what they use for the Prophet?"

We sit together on the bed with our legs pressing against each other as we set up the wizard camera. It's a smaller model—so new it's nearly impossible to get anywhere but on the black market, which is where I got it—meant to be less conspicuous among the muggles.

He's excited about taking pictures of us in France (or him and my father in France, unfortunately) but I know it means more than that. People who own cameras have a life narrative; they have other people to show it to. A camera is by itself a perfect anchor for a rootless life.

Then I notice my clothes being pulled off. "Let's take a picture of us, you know."

Par le Trismégiste! I never thought of that! "You will not take any pictures of me naked," I snarl, jerking away. "Or I mark my words, Harry Potter, I will leave you and never come back. I'll take off all your little fetishes and you'll have to do without. Do you want the Daily Prophet to have proof I'm a degenerate? Do you want to give them an excuse to exile me somewhere horrible? We'll never know peace on this earth if you don't learn some restraint!"

I'm yelling at him and he's looking frightened. "I'm sorry Sev, don't leave me, whatever you do."

We go out and take pictures of the sidewalk cafes near sunset, with all the French motorcars going by.

Harry and I spend the next days falling in love—him with France and me with this artist I never knew dwelled within him. There is so much I didn't learn about him up until the age of 18, and now there are so many more facets left to discover. I never knew he was artistic. His parents weren't. But then, Hogwarts doesn't emphasize the arts, magical or otherwise. And Harry was a very, very preoccupied boy.

As an adult, it's not that he's had no interest, but years of depression have layered over his ability to enjoy things, to have enough faith in himself to try.

The camera in his hand steadies Harry's gaze. He begins stopping us at the oddest times during our explorations in France. He photographs a child's paper hat left on a bench.

"Why are you photographing trash?" my literal mind asks him.

"Shut up."

Gradually I begin to see that he combines ordinary things in new ways, not because they have to be, but because they could be, because they happened to be.

For the first time he complains about my having to go about transfigured. "I want to take photographs of what I see, and I see you," he wheedles with these new persuasive skills he's discovering.

"Our future together depends on this new identity."

"What if you un-transfigured just a piece of you?" he asks suddenly.

"What, no, I—" My rejection is automatic, and then I stop to think. "Actually, there's really no harm as long as you're not obviously carrying around pictures of the Alkahest."

Beaming, Harry gets to work finding exactly the right tableau. He finds a bright patch of sun in a deserted square on a day when everyone else is indoors, and poses me in my true form in a bright patch of sun. The resulting silhouette will be easily discernible to him as my own, but to anyone else will be a dark splotch.

Our new game is for Harry to find ways to disguise me in an effort to put me in each picture somehow, my cuff, or something that reminds him of me.

He assembles from our dinner table:

A salt cellar

A glass and a bottle of an unpronounceable apertif

And just my hand put back to its normal form lying on the table half in the shadow of a bottle

He pulls me by the hand around the city we have already gotten to know, that last bit of hard reserve gone this time. "Don't dawdle, Sev, I have to find a way to capture your face relaxed in the wind here, like you never are in England."

And, unlikely model that I am, I let him move me and set me as suits his fancy. My own mind is capturing his face: what he's like far from the torture chamber.

And in my own private time when he's off sketching, I write my pedestrian notes towards a research proposal and then venture out of my normal style to write, "I want to capture the new you that you became without me, sadly, happily. The one that cared enough to save me from putting rocks in my pockets. The one who —" But it's too big. It makes me want to laugh that breathy laugh before the inexpressible, thinking about what Harry has given to me in this short time.

The camera is a modern design that allows you to preview the pictures before going through the expensive process of printing them. We get tired of snatching the device back and forth after a long day, and so I try to create a projector.

"Can I borrow your spectacles, Harry?'

It takes some magic and all that I can remember of magical optics, but a projection of the wizard photos appears on the wall.

"That's brilliant, Sev," Harry exclaims. "Which picture is it?"

A quick trip to a druggist has me back with several nonprescription reading glasses that work just as well—all I need is any sort of lens to get me started. After an hour's experimentation a large version of what is trapped in the camera is depicted on the wall of our hotel room.

We watch everything we've experienced together and it's proof that it happened, proof that we're happening. It's a code that only we can understand. Our own language made of a chipped blue china dish with radishes, or the band of gypsies that came through town one day.

"These are beyond vacation snapshots—you could put these to some haunting music and call it a short French film, mon genie." He puts my hand to his stubbled cheek. "The colors are just right, as if for once the colors that meet the eye are the same as what they are inside."

And we end up rolling over and over in the middle of the projection streaming across the room, our skin soaking up the truth and the colors of our new life together. And when we are done, the colors seep through our quieted skin and straight into our dreams.

With the complete self-absorption common to lovers of every age, everything is our backdrop.

We're grateful for the way everything is falling away from us, that this time is gentle and ignorant for a change.

We study each other, the new and the old, the real and the false, all mixing together.

Sitting on the beach under our gaily striped umbrella with Harry's browned legs sprawling out into the sun, I feel utterly content. He's started sketching around me, and I try not to stare at the strokes that spring from his hand as flawlessly as his mother's hand caught daggers in midair.

Harry's art makes me want to try and respond to it or at least reflect what I find in it, I but I'm a hopeless philistine.

"Your pictures are like Scrying Salt, mon chou: they can make the inner qualities of things reveal themselves even to those of us who lack creativity."

"Are all your metaphors potion-related?" He laughs. "If you were to try and write me a love poem, would it go something like, 'You are a like a salutary mixture of a metallic decoction and with an active distillation in the alembic of my bosom?'"

My cheeks flame. Just because I can neither draw, dance, nor produce any other art doesn't mean I'm incapable of artistry.

"So you do not find me sufficiently imaginative, Mr. Potter. Perhaps I should remind you that I do possess an absolute genius for insults, put-downs, sarcastic rejoinders, and off-hand comments that make you feel small. It seems to be a family trait and I bear it with pride." As always, it feels kind of nice to let out my inner bastard.

"Perhaps I should remind you, Mr. Snape, that I have had four years in hell to assimilate your lessons in acrimony, and I just may have surpassed my teacher in the venom department," says yet another new Harry, one who has a much larger vocabulary and a very much larger store of bitterness than the one I used to know.

"A few university classes pale in comparison to more than twenty years' worth of darkness, Potter."

"Your problem, Snape, is that you mistake quantity for quality."

"Don't be so cocky: quantity is fine and dandy but it can be replaced," I huff, turning away from the swim-trunked figure I know well.

"Sometimes you're the most frightful bitch, Severus."

"Right there we see the mark of an amateur. Sinking to the level of the epithet is an admission of defeat."

"You're just an old prude. You declare your age, slut, cunt, whore."

My color is starting to spread angrily across my face.

"I am as Incongruent as they come, my dear. There isn't a prudish bone left in my body. Those that might have once been there have all been replaced."

"Is that so? Then let's have a wager."

"What is at stake?" I ask, suspicious.

"The loser has to—" He whispers something impossible to repeat.

"Par le Trismégiste! I will do no such thing!" What has he been getting up to these four years?

"So you admit you will lose," he grins.

"Of course I won't. I've been holding myself back, you dictionary dilettante. You probably have notes in your pocket to help you remember the grown-up words."

"You might benefit from the same—it might keep you from mixing words in from other languages. And sometimes you do that thing with your neck like when you're talking to birds."

My hands clutch my neck in horror. "No! I thought I stopped shifting languages like that in childhood!"

He sneers, seeing he's struck home. "You can dish it out but not take it, hypocrite. You think that just because the laws of nature don't apply to you, that you can get away with a different code of ethics as well."

He looks at my staring eyes, thinking he's gone too far. "I'm s—"

"You are the only one for me," I say, the sharp-edged wave of arousal nearly knocking me back in the sand. No one has ever been able to enjoy nastiness as much as I do.

There is no one else in the world who would find trading insults sensual, but something sizzles across our little patch of sand, something that is much blacker than the shade cast by the parasol flapping over our heads.

We spend the afternoon in the hotel.


	36. Chapter 36

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 36: Social Issues

One night we are walking on the beach together. It is a warm night, the warmest since we have arrived. Late September is not the prime tourist season, so we've been able to exist comfortably within the space that the uncrowded city gives us during the still-warm days but cool nights. There are other tourists. An elderly couple from Israel, a two middle-aged women from Spain, one of them an invalid, and the gay couple from Denmark who learned quickly that their attempts to befriend us were unwelcome.

The locals sense that I'm not exactly French and that makes me the ideal tourist for some reason—someone who speaks perfect French but has none of the exacting habits of tourists from Paris. Harry and I are just quietly, absurdly grateful for everything and that never fails to win friendliness.

A blind man would know that we're in love, but the ten-or-so year age difference between Harry and my new face is no longer so enormous, particularly because Harry looks older. We are not inhibited in public—for the first time!—but for that reason, perhaps we have been discreet in our affections.

But on the first warm night, our sixth in France, I've lost another bet due to Harry's remarkable verbal vitriol. That, and sometimes I engineer a loss because the stakes Harry sets are so delightful. This time, the wager was that I would walk, in my true form, outside with him. If I haven't done so before now it's not out of fear of being recognized by the muggles so much as not wanting to confuse them with Harry walking, very much in love, with two different men.

When I reverse the transformation that is becoming second nature, it feels wonderful to have the wind on my face, in my hair (braided in the gypsy style), and looking down and seeing my arm on Harry, well, it makes me a little more daring than usual. We're working on Harry's French pronunciation the best way I know how—by my shaping his mouth to make the right sounds with my own.

Harry has learned the words of everything we had at dinner and is working on the verb forms to order for himself the next morning at breakfast when we hear it.

"That's right disgusting, that is."

"It's bad enough he's a queer, but to carry on with that old queen."

"Ay mate, why don't you blow a real man?" This last is accompanied by ribald laughter and the three young men pushing each other to get first in line for what they think is an irresistible offer for Harry. Since they are obviously drunk, they end up stumbling in the sand.

Hermès, I need to become more attuned to threats from muggles! I exclaim inwardly while adjusting my shield. The three brats, obviously moneyed students who have escaped from some British university for the weekend, couldn't hurt us if they tried, now, so I say, "Come, Harry, I think you need a few more tutorials," I say, my hand on his arm promising some enjoyable new shapes.

No one else would be able to tell from his calm face, but his arm feels like molten iron. "Where are you lads from?" he asks in a friendly tone.

"Leeds," one of them says, surprised that Harry isn't defensive.

"I was at University College in London, but only for night courses," the filament vibrating at a high frequency beside me says. "Here on holiday like us?"

The group's collective sneer that had slipped a bit with surprise is now firmly in place again. "No, man, we're not fucking nasty old queens like you are. My father's company has a time share in town, and no one was using it."

"Well then, enjoy yourselves, the one bakery with the fish on the sign, how do you pronounce the name?" he turns to me.

"La truite zébrée," I say in my clearest French.

"La truite zébrée is fantastic. Croissants like you've never had them." Harry turns to go and then says, "By the way, my lover can kick all of your asses all at the same time."

There is a chorus of ugly laughter.

"That scarecrow?"

"Actually it looks more like the crow."

"That one looks like she'd be afraid to get her hair messed up."

"You don't believe me?" Harry does a good imitation of surprise. "Maybe you'd like a little wager?"

"Harry, no," I say, wishing I hadn't indulged his anger at these inconsequential boys.

"Harry, no," one of them says in high, fluting voice that couldn't be more unlike my own.

"You see, this isn't about us. Let's just go on with our night."

The look in Harry's eyes effectively translates to, "If you walk away right now don't expect me to come back with you."

I sigh and turn to face my would-be attackers, who whoop with delight at the prospect of beating me up.

"What do we get?" asks the largest one.

"Besides the pleasure of putting a queer in his place, I'll give you fifty pounds," he pulls out some of the English money he has left.

"This is our lucky night, mates," the medium-sized one chortles. "You sure you want it to be all of us at once? It doesn't seem sporting."

"We wouldn't want anyone to be deprived of their sport," I say to Harry drily.

They're taking off their shirts and prancing a little bit for my benefit thinking it will distract me, these dull muggles who think I could feel anything for them. "Are you ready, Nancy?" one says.

Who knows what a few drunken boys unused to any type of combat proposed to do to me, but it was extremely difficult not to kill them by fending them off. Promising myself I'll give Harry a good tongue-lashing for putting me in this position, I allow them in to my shield far enough so they can be dispatched on a short arc through the air and land without too much force in the sand.

After their initial surprise they try again and again, growing stubborn and then angry. "What are you, some kind of martial arts mary?" one says, picking himself up off the ground after a fourth go.

"Can we go now?" I ask Harry.

"Certainly, love, you were wonderful, as always," he says and gives me a kiss that nearly knocks me over the way these boys weren't able to. "Now I need a cigarette," Harry says. "Can any of you oblige?"

The cigarette is lit easily from within my shield, the lighter handed back, and we're on our way at last.

"Why did you put those ridiculous students in harm's way?" I begin my tirade.

"So, how do you feel?" Harry says, grinning at the way I scowl at the smoke coming out of his nose.

"Feel? Relieved I didn't snap their necks." He gives me a look. "I suppose it was good not to just take that kind of unpleasantness lying down."

"Good. I'm glad you feel good, Severus. Because I can't bleeding well believe you sometimes!"

This promises not to be a dueling match with blunted weapons.

"I don't know about you, but I've had precious little to be happy about in my life, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let three bored idiots take so much as five seconds of my first holiday ever."

"But Harry, if we'd just kept walking we could have—"

"What did you think of them calling you an old queen?"

"It was not the worst thing I have been called."

He throws the cigarette away and bores into my eyes. "You let them get to you. Right now part of you is thinking about it. You're going to add it to the list of things you obsess about."

There is a mad look to his face, but it is the madness of the prophet. "I knew that people would object to the age difference," I say lamely.

"You are such a fool!" Harry is shouting full throttle—luckily the wind carries most of the force away. "You don't get it, Severus. We're not back in your time, when you could think it was all just little you who liked other boys, your conflict about it—"

"I think that my sexual problems are probably unique on this earth," I protest, starting to get annoyed.

"But you're not the only one. People my age know that there are tons of gay people everywhere. We don't have the luxury to think it's about one coming out drama more or less. It's this whole institutionalized system that makes it stupidly hard for us to be who we are."

"As soon as you tell me what we're arguing about I'm more than happy to argue back, Harry."

"You want to know what my definition of a queen is?" Harry wheels on me, suddenly white with anger. "To me, a queen is someone who thinks it's all about him and his boyfriend and his right to be a bitch for how hard it was for him coming up. I've known people like this, Severus, and they make me sick. You of all people, I would have thought understood—there are some things you just can't let people get away with in the grand scheme of things."

"Grand like drunken teenagers? You wish I cared more about what those three simpletons think about me?"

"In a lot of countries it's against the law to be gay. And even when it's not against the law people have a way of making your life unnecessarily miserable, humiliating and dangerous," he lists. "They all start with that kind of ignorance. Why should you pass up the chance to educate people? I never do, and sometimes they seem to understand at the very least that I'm not going to give them that little charge they're after, the one where they take my evening and put it in their control."

"Harry, please don't take offense—there is nothing anyone can say or do that will make me care what a muggle thinks of me. It's not my culture. You were raised in their world. I was not. Precisely what I've been enjoying so much about being here is that I am surrounded by people who don't think I'm an anomaly. For the first time I can be around people without them shrinking away fro me. I've come to rather enjoy how much they ignore me. And now you want me to start caring what people think again?"

"This isn't about muggles and wizards. Whether you like it or not, Severus, you're part of a movement."

"A movement? A movement that would have me?" I laugh with real enjoyment.

"The gay rights movement, idiot," Harry says as if I'm truly dumb.

"Harry Potter always did like to have a cause," I say, trying to lighten the mood, but he looks deeply offended, so I continue, "You think our age difference isn't going to give people pause in any part of society, gay or not? It wouldn't be hard to find a young man your age of similar inclinations who would think this 'old queen' was a less than suitable partner for you."

"I swear by Merlin's beard, Severus, if I ever hear you call yourself that again, I am leaving you for good. How can you be so stupid as to internalize something that some yob from Leeds said on a drunken spree in France, right before they probably went back to their flat and circle-jerked over us?"

"You want me to take them more seriously, but less seriously, you think that our age difference is meaningless but you fault me for not understanding the times. How many more double-binds do you plan on putting me in this evening? I find them somewhat less stimulating than your usual bonds and just as easy to slip out of."

"Do you know what's been going on in Uganda with the anti-homosexuality legislation? Do you know what the American Defense of Marriage Act is? What about all the places that can't have a gay pride parade in peace because they get attacked?" He takes my mystified expression to denote ignorance "Do you know how many places in the world we might get killed for being love? When was the last time you read a newspaper—not that French answer to the Daily Prophet?"

"I knew about Uganda and have heard a little about violence at parades," I say. "The Defense of Marriage act doesn't sound familiar."

"And where did you hear about them?"

"From the birds."

He sits down on the sand. It's getting cold; we're all alone. I put my jacket over his shoulders and he doesn't throw it off.

"Who ever heard of someone getting their news from birds?" he seems deflated by the bizarreness of it, as if totally unprepared for the entrance of animals into the argument he was winning up until this surprise development.

How to explain to him that the birds have the longest uninterrupted oral history on earth? They have the greatest reach of any group of animals, and are usually more objective than people. Perhaps it has something to do with their being attuned to atmospheric changes, but sometimes the birds can sense things before they happen. Like all species, certain things are more likely to catch their interest than others. The day I tried to cut my arm off and it reattached is etched in their long memory as the Cry That Made the Land of Snow Tremble because it was heard in Iceland. They have their own pet name for me, which roughly translates to "The Big Lout Who Nevertheless Knows How to Speak the Ancient Tongue," which is what they call their language.

"They're more objective than journalists," is all I can think to say.

He snorts. "You just don't want to come into the modern world because it scares you, having to take a stand outside of your little personal bubble."

My arms encompass the electric lighting on the shore. "I am in the modern world. It's just not the same one they seem to have filled your head with at university. You've always lived your life divided between two worlds—why set one against the other now?"

"I've worked very hard at my schooling," he snaps. "We can't all be a prodigy."

I ignore the gibe. "Have they taught you grammar? Unlikely, because I've seen your letters to your friends. History? Classics? Science? Languages? Hardly. What then have you learned that gives you right to ruin a greater portion of my holiday than those three thugs did with this rant of yours?"

He opens his mouth and shuts it. "They taught me how to win an argument on Social Issues," he says, the capitals audible and then grins. "Mostly it comes down to being the one who started it first."

"Apparently."

He pulls me down on the ground and we take off our shoes to bury them deep in the still-warm sand. I think this confusing argument is over and then he says, "It's like your whole Incongruent thing."

"What?" That word always riles me.

"You see, you take it as an insult, but to me, to a lot of people, it's a good thing—being different, it's erotic and important in and of itself." He kicks sand on me to kneel next to me. "Whoever heard of a man with hair down to his knees? You are incongruent in so many ways." His eyes pick them out. "You don't fit. And I love you for that, I'm hot for you because of that."

And he is hot, his skin is blazing hot when he presses it against mine.

"When I think of all the shit you've had to go through, Severus, before me, with me, all the reasons you almost aren't here with me today," his voice breaks, "I can't help but think that that has something to do with a big plan that exists somewhere—'stamp out the Incongruents.' Doesn't that sound like something on the books at the ministry?'

"You read the court transcripts. It is on the books!" I exclaim. "That was one of the charges against me: 'Fomenting an Unrecognized Form of Indecency,' which carries five more years each count than 'Fomenting a Recognized Form of Indecency!'"

"Charges against you? You don't even remember the trial. You were safe in Azkaban." I snort. "No really, you started digesting the walls and the magic that kept people in there. You were the only one who was safe there."

My mouth sets at the reference to me digesting walls, but he continues, "I was the one who was perfectly sane and subjected to all those interrogations."

"I read the transcripts, Harry, and though it might have felt like it was worse than that, they only called you to the court once."

He throws sand at me. "You must be joking. They had me in chambers half a dozen times, and then the court-ordered doctors and counselors. And the Prophet doing everything it could short of kidnapping me to get the story? It was like that case, you know the one where the witness was locked up instead of the murderer she saw—"

"Grungerford."

"Exactly like that. I had done nothing wrong! I'd killed their evil wizard, more like! But they got one whiff of some sexual practice that didn't square with their idea of what any boy, much less the Boy Who Lived, should be doing, and they were after me like a bunch of cats after the scent of a mouse. They asked me my sexual preference three times under Veritaserum in open court. They had the kindness to submit me to Veritaserum behind closed doors to ask me about my sexual fantasies about my classmates. And the wizard papers you like so much—"

He is crying now, he's so angry, but I can't look away.

"They had to keep up appearances so they couldn't hound their savior too much in public, so they went after my friends. You want to know why I don't see Hermione and Ron and Nigel and some of the others very often? Because the ministry, but mostly the reporters, they followed them around and demanded to get their side of the story. But there wasn't any other story, as you know, because I bloody well bawled my way through the entire truth when I was on the stand. So for months anyone who knew me at all at Hogwarts was questioned and sent owls and—"

His man's voice is raw.

"They don't blame me for it. None of them do. You know they signed that petition vouching for your innocence just as everyone else at the school did, but I still don't like to face them. Knowing that my choices, my fucking lack of choices, whatever it was, affected them like that."

"But you went to work for the ministry!" I protest. "Each administration claims to be different than the last, but all they do is carry out a short purge of the most loyal and it's back to business."

"Precisely. I wanted to change them from the inside. It's easy to have an opinion about me, about anyone you don't know well. Everyone thinks they know the Boy Who Lived because they've read lies about him in their morning paper for years. Severus, I can tell when someone's looking at me, versus what they think about me. I've been patiently teaching them to look at me since I was eleven, and I've gotten jolly good at it. Since the trial I had to start all over again, but my coworkers would find themselves just talking to me like a regular bloke at some point, and they'd look at me, and from that look in their eyes I could tell I'd made one more person understand."

Harry stops and realizes that the look in my eyes is transmitting anything but understanding of his mission to reform the ministry.

"I'm sure that the Minister himself and those three muggles have benefited from the lessons you've imparted in sexual politics. As I am at the moment. Richly," I drawl.

"Ugh!" Harry gets up and stalks back towards the hotel.

For some reason the whole strange experience reminds me of Harry's mother, and how angry she used to get when she felt slighted or left out because she was a muggle-born within the wizarding world. Could Harry be harping on the symbolic slight from the Leeds boys because he's beginning to sink into paranoid delusions like Lilly?

Hiding my fears, I follow him to a cinema where they are showing something neither of us is familiar with—me because this is only the second time I've been in a movie theater, and him because he knows nothing of French film. It's a way to be together without having to listen to each other talk. Sitting in the darkened room I forget that I'm with Harry—to me, brought up in a world where magic was commonplace, this is truly magical. And the French actress is stunning. Maybe because she reminds me a little of my mother, with her wavy black hair and pale oval face, I find her mesmerizing. There are tears running down my cheeks at the dramatic ending, and I remember Harry, whose face is thankfully his own again and not the champion of any society.

"This was a beautiful experience, mon amant," I say, resting my hand on his back as we walk out. "That woman was so moving in the speech about her little sister."

"Little sister? I though it was her daughter," Harry says, as we re-emerge into the French night.

"Weren't you wearing your Rosetta ring?"

He pats his pockets and retrieves the ring from his pants. "I didn't care what they said so much, I just wanted to experience what it was like to be in a French cinema and surrounded by the language without having to think about what it meant."

"Much like I feel about muggle society?" I ask.

It was then that I discovered one of the great pleasures of being in a relationship: that of pretending to be annoyed so that one can engineer just the right sort of making up.

The next morning Harry orders breakfast and his pronunciation is markedly improved.

As we have done every morning since we arrived, I apparate to Paris to pick up a copy of the wizard newspaper and then walk with Harry to a café, usually La truite zébrée. We order bread that tastes very much like house elf bread, or like my grandmother's biscuits—like a pure idea made barely solid and about to become a pure experience on the tongue. Harry buys whatever English language newspaper he can find, and we settle with our periodicals and our tea, and in Harry's case, a series of potions I have him take with meals.

This morning I'm reading The Revealer—which is just as much of a rag as the Daily Prophet, but which I have a soft spot for because it's named after the technical term from potion-making. The main difference with the English paper Harry and I detest so thoroughly is that it has a philosophy section in which amateurs and professional pundits alike carry on debates about the sort of obscure topics that would get Lessmore's old academics up in arms. Their rivalries are intense and completely incomprehensible to the outsider, but no less hilarious for it.

I burst out laughing and draw looks from the tranquil patrons of the café. "Listen to this," I say to Harry and translate some of the more vicious repartee,

"_I humbly recommend that Monsieur Lefèbvre actually read the Emerald Tablet of the Thrice-Great, a matter that can be accomplished with a decent decoding charm bought for a dime a dozen at your neighborhood Spell-shop, rather than busying himself with muggle translations like Newton's or—worse yet!—that so-called translation by the mountebank Viroux, who had it as "a fire that becomes earth." Even Bacstrom had it, "has been united with a spirituous earth," which is to say, the nature spirits imbued in the soil whose many and varied existence has been confirmed by such august investigators as Madame Borrell and Monsieur Levy._

_As I have said many times, the problem is not raising any spirit, but specifically which variety of spirit, because the next line, mark it well, says "Separate that spirituous earth from the dense or crude by means of a gentle heat, with much attention," before it goes on to describe the animal or creature, we know not what it is, that is to be raised by this operation._

_Until Monsieur Lefèbvre orients himself within these very few—but very finely wrought!—verses on the Tablet, I am afraid he will only be able claim "as above, so below," in terms of the wit to be found in his Northern and Southern hemispheres."_

Normally Harry would laugh with me. Today he puts his paper in front of his face to hide his smile.

Lessmore would have laughed herself silly.


	37. Chapter 37

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 37: (Happy) Accidents

I want to go on a cycling tour to Nice," Harry says, flinging down the day-old Times, which was all he could find today.

"Oh, I thought we could go bathing." It's good that Harry agreed to a site on the French seaside, because it seems the only way I can keep myself balanced is being by the sea. The constant reminder of something large and liquid helps me bear the immense weight of my stolen magic. We've taken brief bus excursions and walked and lain by the shore, but Harry never wants to stay in the water as long as I do. And he can't swim nearly as well as I, but I don't feel comfortable assuming my normal form that close to shore. Swimming transfigured makes my real skin itch underneath the other skin, demanding contact with the pure water.

"Then let's do our own thing today and meet up at the evening," he suggests.

"Let me cast the trident first, but you've been testing just fine," I say, guilty at feeling relieved to have a day to myself. "When does that cycling tour meet?"

"They meet at ten, so we only have half an hour," he replies, tossing aside the paper. Our eyes scarcely meet as we rush to get him ready. I give him the cellular phone we've bought to field calls about university interviews and other details about setting up our lives here. He puts it in the bag with his camera and sketchpad and then, with a kiss to my cheek and a look of gratitude, he is gone.

Within five minutes I'm in my trunks and wading into the water. With strong strokes I propel myself at an angle from where I started so the bathers are increasingly less likely to recognize me. I submerge myself in the deep, catch a tiny bit of the unknown songs of the fish, and resurface as Severus Snape. My true skin drinks in the seawater, my magic unfurls itself from the tiny corner I've had it bunched up in to be around people, and I swear it touches as far as the coast of North Africa.

Ahhh.

It's so much easier to think in the water, so I spend almost an hour alternately swimming and floating, considering last night.

I've not thought that much about Lilly in years, and now I wonder if it's not just the similarities in her and Harry's enthusiasm for causes. With Lilly, it might very well have been that her madness, the undoing caused by me, happened slowly over many months. If I had been paying more attention, if I'd been less blinded by my need for her, perhaps it could have been recognized in time and taken steps to stop it.

Yet here I am, losing myself happily in the waves, and just as easily relaxing in the trough of what must be the natural up-and-down of a couple's life together. Today we are apart, tomorrow we may stay in bed all day. But Harry and I can't afford that luxury ordinary couples take for granted—trusting that things will work out. I have to be able to track his magical levels and the effects of all the remedies we're trying to keep him in an optimal state.

When Harry comes back he is tired, slightly sunburned but full of enthusiasm about the French countryside.

"What did you do today, Severus?" he asks while we set up the projector so he can show me the photos from his excursion.

"Worked on notes for my research project I need to sell to the universities," I say with a twinge.

He smiles the way he always does when I refer to our future together, which is not very far in the future at all.

I smile back and gaze at these shimmering images that possess an artistic magic I could never replicate. In a way these notes I've begun to take about our time together are part and parcel of the research I wish to do at whatever muggle university is gullible enough to swallow my trumped up credentials:

My study is how to keep Harry and me together without killing him or driving him insane.

The next day we divide between sketching and writing, respectively, on the beach, and getting reacquainted after our day apart. Does everyone change so much day to day as this man does? The hard look that Harry's face sometimes acquires is gone. In its place is this stranger who has shipwrecked on the remote island that is my life. Afterward we lie in our hotel bed silently, taking each other in with our eyes and the tips of our fingers and our toes.

"The Boy Who Lived," I whisper, and for once the title that he never wanted isn't an insult or a joke or a curse. I'm just so very glad he did live through everything he has survived.

"So are you," Harry says in the same tone. "You're much more The Boy Who Lived than me after everything you've been through."

The moment is pure enough that I can't think of shattering it with a comment about my age or most of my sorrows having been brought on myself. "The two Boys Who Lived, then, they must take care of each other."

Harry puts his right hand in my left hand. "Agreed." It's as though a tremendous weight that this young man has always had to shoulder alone is now at least half off his shoulders.

He sleeps, and I summon my notebook and pen from across the room so I can write my observations and questions about his latest trident reading, which is much the same as the previous one. Perhaps his regimen of potions and my visualization exercises in bed are working. I'm dying to cast the trident but I don't want to disturb my lover by extricating my hand.

An hour later he wakes up and then we're distracted by showering together—always a bad idea if there's something else to do—and then choosing a new restaurant.

It's a beautiful night, with a clarity in the air from the slight chill that makes everything seem like it's exactly the way it's supposed to be. Harry and I are having dinner, which is mostly longing looks exchanged over an excellent poached fish, when suddenly he can't lift his fork.

"Sev?" he asks anxiously, "Why won't my arms move?"

Elegantly, I stand up, leave some money on the table, and move his body under my power in some approximation of his normal walk out of the restaurant. Then I hail a taxi and we are carried to the hospital while I kick myself for not testing whether it is safe to apparate him when his magical level is very low, because it is infinitely better than kicking myself for making him this sick and then not bothering to notice. His nose bleeds all over my shirt, so that at first they think I'm the injured one. Until I try to set Harry in a chair in the waiting room and he's too weak to keep himself from sliding out of it.

My calm is irreproachable in the hospital. I translate for Harry, who can scarcely move his lips. I do my best to implant ideas into the doctor's mind so that he will do the tests I think are appropriate. I consider a way to sneak in some of the potions I'd left at the hotel. And most of all I am negotiating with the Severus Snape of the future, who is going to use potions or hexes to quiet his accursed sex drive and take an Unbreakable Oath to never touch his lover again, if only Harry gets better.

When a nurse comes in and asks me my relationship to Harry, I remember that in this form, I'm much closer to Harry's age, so I say I'm his partner and leave it up to her to make an issue of it. She nods and eventually Harry is wheeled away for tests and I'm left in a chintzy cubicle imagining an enraged mob of magical people roaring at me for what I have done, for what they knew I would do, to the Boy Who Lived.

"The Boy Who Lived—Died Satisfying the Alkahest's Appetites!" "The Alkahest Destroys Everything, Even What He Who Must Not Be Named Could Not!" is resounding in my head when the doctor approaches.

"I'm Dr. Clairoux. The nurse tells me you are very inquisitive. Are you in the field?" he asks me while offering me his hand in that muggle custom I'll never get used to.

"In a fashion. I'm Julian Moreau, a scientist." The hand I extend feels strange to me, the name feels strange, but what is completely familiar is the dread. This incident might get back to the all-knowing Dumbledore and cause him to activate his contingency clause that will take Harry away…. Then I curse myself for being so selfish to think about that while Harry is ill.

The doctor is noticing that there is something underneath my carefully controlled exterior, so I smooth over my shield. "I don't know what's wrong with your friend—partner," he corrects himself, "but I would like to keep him overnight. We may have to intubate him at any moment. People don't just suddenly become too weak to move, as I'm sure you'll agree."

"Of course, thank you doctor," I agree. We're entirely in this muggle's hands. There is no asking Albus. He cannot know. I'm completely on my own and wish I felt safe taking Harry to a wizard hospital, but they'd no doubt connect Harry Potter and the signs of being drained by what would have to be me. Our plan is not going to work. Our plans…

The doctor comes back and without preamble asks whether Harry and I are up to date with our HIV tests. We are, actually. I dragged Harry to get tested the second morning we spent together, just as a way to show we weren't starting with any secrets. (We'd both been the reluctant center of the mental health world's attention for so long we had all of our tests and shots anyway, so I wasn't concerned). Clairoux nods when I answer we'd both just been tested and says something about risk groups and I hate him for a moment.

Then he starts asking, again without preamble, about Harry's genetic heritage and if anyone in his family had any number of horrifying degenerative neuromuscular diseases. Of course I don't know, but if I did, the cause of his illness is clearly me. It's the effect I'm worried about—his kidneys not working, his blood levels getting subtly but fatally out of whack. A heart attack from an electrical imbalance. A stroke from a blockage. These are my fears. But the Future Severus is selfishly raging at the nice doctor because this is the me who will be the one to lose sleep over which he'd rather Harry suffer from—multiple sclerosis or being eaten by his lover's magic.

The doctor's eyes have been roving around the room and then he looks right at me. "What is wrong with your friend's brain?"

He proceeds to show me printouts and rattle off test results along with a staccato summary of what makes them different than normal. Where is Lessmore when I need her? Actually, I follow him mostly very well—perhaps because my mind is desperate to understand.

I suddenly wish I'd read more about the scientific investigations into the magical brain. There have been a few in our world, or occasionally a wizard or witch will volunteer for a muggle medical study. It's impossible to say what baseline is for Harry, but the doctor gives me some interesting places to start my study, should I ever get to school.

All I understand from his explanation is that Harry's brainwaves seriously deviate from the norm. If that is so, I'm sure mine would really fall off the charts designed for muggles.

Trying to assure the doctor that Harry is not completely off his rocker, I remark "He does suffer from depression. Perhaps that factors into these results?"

Then the doctor starts going off on psychosomatic problems and conversion disorders and I want to scream at the muggle slant on psychiatry that seems to think that one can't have both mental and physical maladies at the same time, so I use my shield to start moving him away. We aren't going to get any answers tonight, and at least I know all Harry's organs are still working.

As if reading my mind the doctor says, "Other than gallstones, he's basically in good shape."

"Gallstones?" I repeat.

"It's the English diet, you know," he says and we exchange a superior look as Frenchmen. "Your partner will be coming back from testing soon. He had to be sedated a little because he was very nervous." The doctor gives a small bow to my thanks and leaves.

Rose-croix! I didn't think of how frightened Harry would be having strangers' hands all over him.

Quickly I apparate back to our hotel, grab my potions and trident and return to the room.

Harry is wheeled in a few minutes later and he looks too small, too young on the hospital bed. He feels the wrong magical color, and it must be the tranquilizer. His upper lip has traces of a stanched nosebleed. They are giving him fluids and I thank all that is good in the world that he can still breathe on his own.

He could be dead right now from paralysis of the lungs. I add another fear to my list.

When he realizes I am there his face lights up like a sluggish sunrise.

"Ssh, don't try to talk." And it's all I can do not to scream when he reaches two fingers a few centimeters towards my hand and my hand wants to comfort him and yet I know it will take some small fraction of his magic away.

Just like with my mother, his magic needs to go somewhere, to be directed to some purpose in him, and when it's not there he's fundamentally unbalanced, undone. I don't want him to go mad. I don't want him to die.

He lies there and basks in the strength and love that I manufacture for his sake. I'm saying endearments in French and then translating them because we are moving to France, of course. But all I can think of is the paint in my childhood home swirling around in the air because I'm digesting it off the walls. How my mother lost the power of speech early on.

In the clarity of this night, with Harry's two fingertips ghosting over my skin to reassure himself of my presence, I advance the science of Spagyrics farther than I have in twenty years. Harry's screaming diatribe at my cottage was correct—I've not been trying hard enough.

The nurses stop coming round so often and I try to contact Harry's mind directly. It's not something I've tried to do since we've been back together because I don't want to bring back bad memories, but he's either too sedated or we can't do it without Voldemort as an intermediary (curse the name!) He's looking at me with heavy lids, following my movements to cast a strong shield to give us some privacy. I cast the trident and his magic is almost gone except for the tiny trickle going towards me.

"Harry, mon amant," I am saying, and I start mixing all the different languages I know just so he will hear my voice and know he is not alone.

I'm trying to tell if any one of several new salts I've bought have a reaction in the trident when he says clearly "Nng!"

"What is it, love?" I wheel around.

"Nng!" he says, looking fixedly at a salt that is orange in exterior color, though blue in magical color.

"You want to try this one?" Glad to be doing something, I float a small pinch of the powder above him. It swirls over his gallbladder and a few other places.

"Nng! Nng!" He's saying urgently, but I hush him and try the other salts. They do nothing spectacular, so I kick myself for not bringing an alembic or anything else to decoct, and decide to rub in a little to his wand-hand wrist.

He grabs me with his right hand, startling the life out of me. He's sweating with the effort to try and form words, so I conjure an alphabet and run my finger over it until he blinks twice. Slowly, painfully he spells out the following:

Orange salt need more now luv u sev not blue.

I have to check and see which salt is physically blue because in my mind it's yellow. I consider the properties of the blue/orange powder, which is precipitate of moonstone, and the yellow/blue powder, which is extracted from Petal-pore rock. My mind is whirring while I take a mostly neutral salve I brought and mix in the salt that Harry asked for. I make a brief charm over it to distribute it evenly and then anoint his temples. His face clears immediately. Now alert, he watches me anoint points along the right side of his body.

When I put just a little over his gallbladder, he actually says something that sounds like "fuck!"

When I begin on his left side, he winces, however.

"What is it, Harry?"

Prickly. Not good prickly.

This throws me off entirely. My science, and any magical science, allows for differences between the right and left sides of the body, but the whole left side shouldn't be showing an aversion that registers as a slight coldness, now that I know to look for it.

My eyes are scanning around the room while I consider, and then I smack myself in the forehead.

Hermès!

Harry makes a questioning sound.

"I forgot to make a neutral magical space before I cast the trident, that's all. Who knows what sort of variables are throwing things off. Just a minute, Harry."

Sure enough, on the left side of his body is where the vent with that hospital-smelling air is coming out of. Who knows what sort of things live in that. My hands pick up something very faint–a blue? A green?–that is a definite active cool, but it's so heavily layered over by the artificial Neutralizing chemicals muggles favor I can't get any closer than that.

Whatever it is, it's interfering with the very positive reaction Harry was having to the blue/orange moonstone extract, and I won't have that. Yet banishing all influences, as any practitioner who wasn't beside himself with anxiety would have done, might get rid of some other invisible element that is contributing to the benefit Harry was deriving from the moonstone.

After some experimentation I arrive at a compromise: the shield on the left side has an extra layer to it, which I adjust at random until Harry says the prickly feeling goes away.

"Lll!"

"This feels good?"

Harry spells out: Like that! Leave it like that! More orange!

So with a trembling hand I distribute more "orange" compound to Harry's left side.

He takes a deep breath. "I feel like…the two sides of my body were traveling in different directions, and now they're not."

His head falls back, exhausted from the effort of speech, but he breathes deeply and appreciatively.

Hiding a fraction less of alarm, I smile encouragingly and kiss him and have just enough time to make my belongings disappear and sit down looking tranquil before the nurse comes back. The woman looks suspicious and checks a monitor attached to Harry. She gives me a sour look and I realize his pulse was speeding up.

While she busies herself with his monitors, my own heart is racing much faster.

The standard text on individualized medicine, Aberthwack and Twick's Cyclopaedia of Magical Correspondences, has been used for almost a hundred years, and yet it's little more than a suggestion of what might happen between a person's magic and various common treatments. And no one has done much to improve it since. If my life had gone as planned, perhaps I could have been the person to systematize this vague science, because I can actually sense the things these pioneering magical scientists could only observe in patients. Why these different reactions occur are just as far beyond me as they were to them.

Acknowledging that there are these hidden variables that cause great—sometimes fatal—differences in reactions to treatment is still a huge advance. Even without my gift, given enough data and the proper sort of equations, a close observer could come up with patterns that can help predict—for one person—what foods to eat/avoid, what remedies to use, what spells will be easy or taxing, and the psychological problems one tends to have. This much Lessmore and I had theorized, and it's not a unique idea.

What we proposed to do was determine some of the patterns and then extrapolate to a much more complete vision of a person, magically, physically and emotionally, down to potion prescriptions they can take on a preventative basis and the potential for telepathy between different people's matrices. It was a huge undertaking that would have required an enormous research team, which was why we were so anxious to get me placed at a university with good resources. The decisive asset was me, and my ability to determine what qualities a potion or a person was bringing to the table. It was the interaction we were unsure of.

It is an irony that I, myself, am the worst possible guinea pig, because nothing reacts with me the way it does for other people. Worse yet, I can't seem to pick out what compounds are particularly salutary for me. What Harry did, preferring one salt over another, I could sit there all day and not be able to decide what's right for me, though I can say what reacts in a positive manner with another substance or a person.

Since I'd not had any live subjects in years, I never thought to ask someone what felt right. All this time I was trying to come up with the overarching theory before testing it.

Tonight I had new information—what felt right to harry and what didn't, as well as his gallbladder problem which just might be the Archimedian one place to stand by which to move the world.

And this happy accident of not banishing the space before I treated him—if I'd done what Lessmore taught me before anything else, I wouldn't have found that the environment adds a new level of complexity that can apparently be very helpful indeed.

When the nurse left I cast the trident again. Harry has regained just a bit more magic. He sees and his tongue flops around in his mouth excitedly. Yes my love, let's celebrate that I haven't completely digested you yet, I think, smiling warmly down at him. We make some experiments and find something to use for his left hand, and after a bit of yellow (to me pink) salve, he says very clearly, "Merlin, Sev, where have you been hiding this stuff?" and he lifts up his left hand and extends it to me until I grasp it and feel it steady in my own.

With equations racing through my mind, I make everything invisible and sit down for the doctor who walks in a moment later. "What are you doing to our patient?" Clairoux asks jovially in heavily accented English. He makes a note of something on the monitor and then uses his stethoscope to listen to Harry's heart. "His heart is beating faster, but that is a good thing compared to the sluggish beat from before," he says to me in French. He looks at his fingers. "Acupressure points," I say, pointing at several points where Harry's skin has a slight sheen from the salve. "I study the intersection of western and alternative medicines."

He is too genteel to sniff at the knowledge outside his tradition, but he is not open to the idea. "Well whatever he does, tell him to let you sleep a little," he says to Harry, and leaves.

"We have much to do together, love," I say, nodding at the awareness that he's helped with a big discovery, "but please do sleep. I won't leave you." I smooth his hair, over and over, until he finally falls asleep.

While Harry sleeps I revise a lifetime's worth of work, mourning Lessmore's absence with every step.

I'd heard of the Philosopher's Stone, of course. Every magical child is brought up knowing that there's something somewhere that is the essence of magic, and that it might not be a bad thing that no one has discovered the ultimate charm that could help or harm the world as we know it beyond repair. Everyone has a barmy uncle or aunt or other distant relation who claims to be farther advanced than anyone has ever been on the road to discovering this Stone, which has been described variously as a liquid, an equation, an incantation, or, to the eugenicists out there like my grandmother, as a genetically perfect magical person.

It all seemed too far off to be of much interest to a practical being such as myself, but I supposed you could phrase some of the theories Lessmore and I were working on in terms of the Philosopher's Stone. For me, it would have to have a chromatic element, because for my specialized system color is the best shorthand. Then again, my childish forays into posture- and sound-magic showed that these dimensions can be very powerful indeed.

Now I'm beginning to see that the Stone could be the compass I've been missing in my attempts to predict magical individuals' reactions to treatment. If we knew this missing variable, be it a number that unlocks predictive phenomena, or somethings that places someone where they are on an axis mapping all potential reactions…. We'd be able to solve many stubborn health problems.

Further, once we know that number, it could probably be used to maximize any person's potential to the point that their weaknesses were almost eliminated and their strengths greatly enhanced. One of the papers we never managed to publish—perhaps because there is little interest in placing wizards and muggles within the same system, albeit very far apart— was that magically inclined people had managed to pick out their "number" in certain circumstances. This facility was what allowed our kind to discover charms and potions and other magical arts that seemed to break natural laws. It was like a key magically inclined individuals had found and only sometimes could they find the right lock.

When Harry wakes up he is much better and we thank the doctor and nurses, all of whom seemed suspicious of something but I saturated them with enough peaceful energy they may not know for a month what it is. I pay in cash, explaining that we are in the midst of relocating, so that we can avoid leaving a trace with the credit cards in the name of Julian Moreau I have been flinging about right and left on this identity-establishing trip. Seeing him wheeled out to the front where the taxis are nearly kills me. All I can think was of Dumbledore watching and being very angry with me for being so selfish.

I carry Harry from the taxi and lay him on the hotel bed. He dozes while I remove his clothes and take a wet cloth and wash off the bad hospital smell I can't bear being associated with him. I place him under the covers and apparate back and forth between my house and the room, the room and an esoteric bookstore in Paris, Paris to a market for an assortment of foods to see what he feels is right to eat. When I return he is just stirring a little. "Severus," he says happily, "I can move my toes."

The future Severus is flogging himself with a cat o'nine tails.

"That's good Harry," I say, and hold him in my arms. He tries to fumble with my shirt and I say, "you can barely move, why are you doing this to yourself?" but he just wants to be skin to monstrous skin, and he falls asleep again.


	38. Chapter 38

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 38: The Exiled Sage

_"The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, Gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them."_

_-Paracelsus_

_Paracelsus learned "from dervishes in Constantinople, witches, gypsies, and sorcerers, who invoked spirits and captured the rays of the celestial bodies in dew."_

_-Manly P. Hall_

We wait only as long as it takes for Harry to be able to sit up on his own, and I take a portkey with him in my arms to our first sage.

If Harry were feeling more like himself, he would probably have expressed concern when we land in the middle of nowhere, or rather, the middle of the Armorican Massif, the rocky region of France near the Roche d'Oëtre. But regardless, there is no reason for concern. I can feel the magic like a loud sound vibrating in the earth.

We've purposely landed a mile away from where the shaman is thought to live, because it's only polite to give him time to prepare himself.

"You all right?" I ask after a few minutes of walking with Harry and a sack of gamla fruit in my arms.

"Fine. This is France? It's lovely." He smiles weakly and we walk for three quarters of a mile in the peaceful green silence.

Then I see him as well as feel him, a long ways off yet. We stop there, me blowing the beads of sweat off Harry's brow, waiting for the man to greet us at the edge of his magical territory.

Finally the man appears so that Harry can see him, still twenty yards away. The exiled sage is wearing a Western jacket with patched elbows on top of a knotted garment that reaches to his knees. He has a wispy moustache and goatee and could be any age between seventy and 700. His feet are bare and he has a staff in one hand and a kestrel gripping his shoulder.

"Charming picture. What do you think they want?" The bird inquires archly.

"Good day to you, sir," I say, bowing, once in Vietnamese and once in the bird language.

The bird is very embarrassed and the sage strokes his feathers soothingly.

In the immense moment that unfurls itself around us, I can see in the sage's eyes that he sees:

a) My own embarrassingly great power, which is oddly not matched by any wisdom to speak of

b) That we are wizards in the European tradition

c) That Harry is very sick

d) That if I can't fix the problem, it must be very serious indeed.

The e), which is the lovers' heat connecting me and Harry, is not worthy of his attention.

The foreign man turns and we follow.

His home is in a cave, which he's made quite cozy. He has an indoor garden and a hearth with a couple pots bubbling away. Silently, he offers tea.

While he is busying himself with the clay cups, I feel him hang his name silently in the air: "To`an." If our quest were not so serious I might laugh. Novices might think this knowledge gave them the right to address the man by his name. I keep a discreet silence while cutting open the gamla fruit. To`an is startled by the burst of light.

Harry and I feed each other a slice to show that it is safe. We can't help but smile. It is the taste of love. The man is surprised by this depth of feeling, too. He waits to see that there are no ill effects from this unfamiliar food, and when Harry gestures weakly to the dish, the sage takes one.

His face lights up, remembering some lost happiness, as I hoped he would.

When I place the sack next to his pile of provisions the old man grunts, breaking his silence for the first time.

Looking much better for the moment from the nutrients in the gamla fruit, Harry breaks the silent calculations being thrown back and for the between the sage and me. "We're sorry to bother you, sir, but we were hoping you knew some way to prevent me from getting so sick."

I translate and the man gives a nod to my excellent pronunciation of his language, or what of it I learned in all of a night.

"You will—permit?" the man says in French, and gestures towards some implements hanging on the wall of the cave.

Harry nods and I can sense his uncertainty. He knows my magic from long proximity, but we really know nothing of this other tradition. It seems to have a lot to do with smoke. To`an sets many small pots to boil, and from what I can tell he doesn't intend to do anything with the contents. One by one he takes the pots and wafts them towards Harry. I can feel some type of magical reaction but it only registers on some far-off atrophied antenna. The man's impassive face is hiding an increasing alarm that I can sense clearly, however.

Suddenly he sits on the ground and pulls out two pouches. Out of one comes tumbling a set of flat, smooth divination stones in black, white, orange and gray. These he spreads out, studies, and recasts a dozen times or more while with the other hand he pulls a bit of tobacco out of the second pouch and fills his pipe.

He lights his pipe with hand magic accompanied by a word and catches the look Harry gives me.

"Severus also lights a fire that way. I need to use my wand," Harry says, and the man doesn't look at me while I translate.

He'd just as soon not be close to me, but the sage is much too well-bred to turn out his guests so abruptly.

Harry's expertise in reading others' judgments doesn't need my assistance to capture this, either.

"My name is Harry, by the way," he says, and turns the ring on his finger.

When the syllables reach the man's ear in Vietnamese with a second's delay he exclaims, "What a marvel!" and Harry twists the ring the opposite way and they beam at each other.

My companion lends the man his ring, who tries several settings until he's laughing heartily. Ignoring me, he offers Harry the use of one of his collection of pipes he unfurls from a leather scroll. Delighted to be smoking anything after weeks of enforced abstinence, Harry selects one and accepts the tobacco, which is mixed with so many herbs it can't do much harm, and inhales greedily.

"You could die," the man says, still smiling, and Harry doesn't at first catch that he's not referring to the dangers of smoking.

This warning is met with a stubborn look requires no translation.

To`an sighs. "In my country we have a myth for creatures such as that," he points at me with his pipe. "They are known as the Thuy Tinh, or the dragon-people descended directly from the Water Spirit. Most Vietnamese people, we are the offspring of a dragon and a fairy, 'con rong chau tien,' a better mixture of things." He waits for the ring to do its work. "We have many myths about the Dragon King of the Waters trying to marry someone of the earth. They belong in a different element than regular people, and though the Water King tries to keep the human in his kingdom for only some part of the year as a compromise, it never ends well."

When Harry grasps this message he sends me a look that says, "Why did you drag me out of bed to talk to this daft bloke?" and he is startled when the sage barks out a laugh as if he understood.

I don't feel the man in my mind but perhaps he is simply skilled with human nature. "Master, if you know of any science or art that can strengthen my friend, I beg you, please teach me."

The man throws aside his distaste for me along with his taciturn manner and launches into a technical diatribe that has us completely immersed for over an hour. On the equal footing offered by science we shoot questions at each other and attain a sharp-edged accord much like the one I've observed between the nurses' and doctors' guilds.

His method is based upon smoke revealing the movement of tiny natural spirits. I compare this to my own method and he scoffs at relying upon any exclusively human medium.

We have pots and substances scattered everywhere and To`an has given up demonstrating his methods on me because they don't turn out right.

Trying to sound nonchalant, I ask the sage, "Does your science take into account the variables in the environment, then? Is that what you're looking at with the smoke?"

The man looks at me as if I am completely stupid. "What kind of a discipline wouldn't take the environment into account?"

"I've always been taught to do a complete banishing of the environment so that I'm starting from a neutral space." And I show him the basic spells used first thing by Lessmore and every other magical practitioner I've observed.

To`an observes me closely and asks me to repeat the charm several times before turning back to his pots. "Unless you're actually performing surgery and need a sterile environment, that's completely counterproductive."

My face flushes for Lessmore's sake and then I remember Harry's reaction in the hospital. "What do you look for then, sir? More of these invisible nature spirits?"

As if reciting the alphabet for a toddler, the shaman turns back to me. "Nature spirits, weather conditions, history, gods, devils. The macrocosm, in a word."

"The macrocosm?" I ape his word because this seems totally beyond the reach of science.

He wheels on me. "I'm sure your Western tradition has this idea. Everyone knows it: 'As above, so below.' In medicine, it means you are always working on two planes, the big world and the man's world, trying—not to change either of these, but to bring them into harmony."

Muttering some very unflattering things about my intelligence, he returns to his clay pots and his calibrations, using his own system as the control.

I stand stock-still for several minutes, immune to his insults. My mind is desperately trying to recall every word of that letter from the Revealer, the one I read to Harry purely for amusement. The person was talking about some particular spirit to be raised from the earth, and quoted the line "As above, so below," from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Perhaps there was more to it than a dry argument between dilettantes.

To`an levitates a whole collection of pots to where Harry is siting. He's brewed a few compounds he thinks might help seal up some of the weakness in Harry's energy field, which the Vietnamese characterizes as a "ship with a leaking hull."

"You assume I did all of these injuries to him, but I did not!" My protest doesn't reach his full attention because our host has turned to watch Harry playing with his divination stones.

"He didn't realize—" I begin, knowing that diviners the world over hate to have their cards or stones or what have you handled by others.

"Be quiet," the sage barks. "Think of the weather and cast the stones," he says to Harry and turns the ring.

Oblivious to the seriousness of the moment, my lover complies.

"Hah! A hailstorm? It won't so much as sprinkle until next week. Never mind, then," he says. "Sit here while I try something on you, Harry."

It takes a lamentable amount of effort for him to drag himself over to the place where all the pots are steaming, but Harry does so, and I cast the trident so we can see any effect on Harry's magic.

The smoke tends to cluster at injuries in his magical field otherwise invisible to me, but with the trident we can see that his magic is not flowing towards me at all.

"Thank you!" Harry exclaims.

The sage's magic moves my hand to touch Harry and the magic starts seeping towards me, albeit more slowly than usual.

"It's still an improvement. Thank you, sir."

The kestrel squawks from his perch at the opening of the cave, where the outside has nearly gone black.

"Par le Trismégiste," I breathe. Usually I can feel any major weather pattern coming miles away, but I've been so focused on helping Harry I didn't feel this anomaly at all.

The hail as big as walnuts pelts the darkened countryside for over twenty minutes.

Our host refreshes our tea, and the two pipes, and Harry and I have a silent conversation about the likelihood that I will stand for this pirate's habit in the middle of muggle France.

Suddenly it is green outside again and the kestrel flies off to investigate.

The sage is putting the finishing touches on a bundle of treatment ingredients for me to use. He ties it up and hands it to me with the mixture of insults and admonitions I would expect from a trained healer from any tradition. He helps a significantly stronger Harry to his feet.

"Thank you sir," Harry says, holding out the pipe. "For the tobacco and everything. I'm sorry for what I said, er thought, earlier. You've been very kind."

The man holds out his palms. "For you," he says in reference to the pipe, and I think he gets a little too much enjoyment out of the triumphant look Harry shoots me. "And this is also for you." He holds out the bag of stones.

"We couldn't possibly—" I say, knowing this is an unheard of bequest of seasoned divination instruments.

"He's no fun, is he?" To`an says and smiles at me while Harry gets the full benefit of the translation. "To you, I am To`an," he says with a bow to my companion. "To you I am the person who gave you your first real lesson in healing science. Never forget you know nothing, Water Spirit," the man says with quite a bit of playfulness behind his gibes.

"So you think I will be all right?" Harry presses.

"I think you should get a job, young man, and stop worrying so much. Your spoil-sport friend can do that for both of you."

We've been ushered out by the grinning To`an and are half a mile away before Harry exclaims, "That bastard kept my ring!"

"Of course he did," I say. "He kept my trident, too. We can get others,"

"Why didn't he just ask?" Harry says, walking slowly but upright.

"Because it would have taken all the fun out of it."

Harry is disappointed to find that he has no more major successes with divination, but then he has no strength to do anything else but cast the stones for several days after that, during which time I've apparated back to London with him in my arms to no ill effect. He starts keeping a journal of his readings, however, because while the Vietnamese sage did give him the stones, he didn't explain anything at all about how to use them.

"I'm sure your friend didn't give you those with the idea that you should make yourself sick over them," I observe as he is casting for the hundredth time and making a diagram of the results.

"You have your magic, Severus. You're busy-busy brewing things and pouring them down my throat. Can't I do something remotely magical while the rest of my magic is fueling your system?"

Just after the words escape his mouth he regrets them. I know this. But I don't give him a chance to apologize because I'm already apparating to my home on the coast of France. For a few days it's just like old times with me and my bird friends. They catch me up on the gossip and I tell them about the rude kestrel and we laugh and laugh the way I seem only capable of with animals. I also try to locate the person who wrote that letter in the newspaper, but alas, the signature, one Alain DuBois, doesn't lead to any magical person that I can find within the bounds of France.


	39. Chapter 39

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 39: Benevolent Subterfuge

Armed with the new batch of potions, as well as replications of the smoke-remedies from the Vienamese master's instructions, I return to Harry's flat.

"Guess what, Severus, I've got a job," he announces proudly.

"As Head Soothsayer at the ministry? I daresay they've had worse," is my offhand remark while taking in the table littered with diagrams from his castings.

"No, I'm going to be an au pair," he says with a defiant air, waiting for me to say something about this traditionally female occupation.

My lip twitches and I make a show of almost taking the bait. "Well, tell me about this scheme of yours while I pour some potions down your throat."

"About that, Severus, you know I didn't mean it."

"Yes you did, and I'd say far worse if it was I who was sacrificing my magic for our relationship. Ah-ah," I hold up a hand with a smoking pot in it, "if you can be brutal about the truth, so can I. Just promise me to be fair when you're being honest. I only sleep an hour a night and the rest of the time is spent on trying to make this work for us."

"All right, all right." Then he launches into a tale of calling on Dumbledore for assistance with this job idea that has been tossing around in his head. Then Albus calling in Hermione, who quickly took Harry in hand. Apparently his old friend has been running an experimental program at the ministry that helps identify children of magical inclinations earlier than Hogwarts. In this way she hopes to both ease muggle-born children's assimilation into the magical culture, and to help these small children have less confusing and conflicted childhoods within their muggle families.

It's a brilliant idea such as Lilly would have been proud to be a part of, which is exactly what I remarked when Albus and I discussed it.

The sage didn't mind being roped in as an accomplice to the scheme I set in motion before our French holiday, fully conscious that the benevolent subterfuge was worthy of a Dumbledore. Dumbledore himself praised me on it.

"He is just a young man of twenty-two," Albus reminds me as he does in every conversation. "He's not likely to listen to your suggestions about what is best. This is a perfect way to ensure he develops other interests."

"He's had other interests, old friend, he's just been too desperately miserable to pursue them very well." I say from his grate.

The old wizard eats a sweet to cover his doubts about Harry's supposed new peace of mind.

The family is made up of two muggle parents and two little girls with marked magical inclinations—the woman is English and the man, French. They live in Versailles, but the father commutes to Paris to do something with the government, and the mother would like to take courses if she could find reliable care for her children, Sophie, 5, and Mathilde, 8, who are for some reason much more of a handful than other children. Ordinarily Hermione's program only works with English families on English soil, but the two little girls reached her detection systems when on a holiday visiting family in Britain, and she's been hoping to do something for them ever since.

It is very unusual for more than one child in a muggle family to be born with magical natures, and thus doubly likely that the parents will have trouble handling them until their letter arrives signaling their entrance into the local wizard academy at age eleven.

Using Hermione's mastery of muggle culture, her program imitates a normal childcare service with the difference that they engineer a meeting with the chosen family and gently spell any other families who might hear of them into forgetting they've heard of the service.

Having grown up in France, the girls speak only poor English. The children will learn English from Harry, and he will learn French from them. It's the perfect low-stress job to prepare for our ultimate goal to attend school.

When I pop my head through the hearth to chat with Hermione and Albus about it, my smugness rivals their own.

Harry's old friend reminds me a great deal of Lilly, so I am prepared to accept any sort of cold treatment from her in the name of her success and collusion with Harry's well-being. She impresses me though: Hermione is able to almost completely ignore her distaste for the being who put her close friend through such an unpleasant time. What is probably an outright disgust for our present relationship is banished to the back of her attention, in favor of this plan to help get Harry back on track.

"The ministry kept him behind a desk," she sniffs. "Harry's a marvelous teacher," and she mentions some incident in which Harry instructed other students at Hogwarts. Since it was before he and I knew each other well, and my companion is modest to a fault, this is news to me, but not at all surprising.

Of course there was an interview with the family and a trial period. Together, Hermione and Harry have cooked up an entire back story for why a 21-year-old with a life that hasn't followed the usual trajectory of college might actually be a prize addition to a family with "gifted children," as the au pair service claims to target.

My main interest is that he has something to do, really do, for the first time since he graduated. Inactivity is bad for Harry, even more so than most people. Without a cause his considerable magic has nowhere to go, and it stagnates. I also want him to have some practice with children so that he can confirm early childhood education is what he wants to study. With the English woman and probably some of the other au pairs in the area, he'll have people to talk to who aren't me. The idea of him spending time with all the other foreign au pairs, all female, causes an odd tinge of jealousy. Would I rather he spent his time with men in their early twenties?

Before he moves to Versailles, Harry gets to practice on the worst student he could possibly have.

"Blast it all, I've lost the message again!"

"Watch it, Severus, you'll melt the keyboard," Harry hisses at me in the internet café where several amused people are watching me trying to learn how to use his muggle laptop hooked up to something or other to send messages through the ether. "Now let's try it together from the beginning."

"The typing will come with time," he assures me as I painfully tap out a message that expresses all my hatred for this process.

_Perhaps you've never noticed but my dexterity only extends to making precise shavings of a Wingerman's mallow_

I type over the space of several minutes.

Harry pushes me aside and rattles out in no time at all

_If you put half the effort you're putting into being tiresome into learning how to do this, we can talk about your other manual skills when you're off in Indonesia or wherever you're going next._

My attitude becomes noticeably more quiescent, and after several practice tries, Harry is assured that I will be able to correspond with him while we are apart for this almost-a-year. As he points out, Hermione's program forbids any explicit mention of magic, which would go against all wizard statutes if done before the arbitrary eleventh year. And an owl flying back and forth would be precisely this sort of admission, as well as being slow with me all over the world collecting samples.

This hated new muggle pastime is but one of the many sacrifices I will be making for our future together. The mobile telephone is another, but that I only use for a touch of verisimilitude as the muggle half of the dual identity I am crafting as Julian Moreau, magical/muggle botanist.

The ambivalent news of Harry's rapid recovery once he is out of my presence is waiting for me the next time I check my messages, picturing the boxy apparatus as a sort of owl all the while.

_Good to know that you have enough energy to keep up with the girls. Found some lovely carnivorous lilies today,_ is my terse reply.

Good to know that my presence produces such a marked degeneration, and the best cure is separation.

My days are filled with explorations in the remotest regions of the world, as well as casual encounters with some magical and muggle scientists Albus has helped me identify as essential acquaintances for my new identity. There are cities to gain a passing familiarity with, languages to refresh my memory on, and then the most painstaking record-keeping I've ever done in my life. This has never been my strong suit, and I mourn Lessmore's loss yet again as I force some dormant part of my mind to concentrate on details like plant and animal shapes and magical qualities.

It is actually another lost friend, Miss Bundle, whose memory helps me in this sense. A few vague memories of the never-ending re-indexing project Dumbledore kept her on in the library helped me piece together my own rudimentary information-management spells. Finally, I begin to understand that this is a genuine branch of magical science, and only wish I had more talent for it. At least I can save myself from the reams of paper that are clumsy to carry around.

Running after two small girls while speaking French most of the time is a daunting task for anyone, and with Harry having so many other issues to carry around, I expect that he will concentrate on the basics during his first few months in Versailles.

To my surprise, he maintains an extensive journal with his divination activities, continues with his photography, keeps up his jogging habit, and begins taking notes for his far-off thesis on early childhood education of magical children.

It's actually a delight to exchange lascivious messages with him and know I'm not stealing a jot of his magic in the process.

_Dear Sev,_

_The girls fight so sometimes it reminds me of you and your cousin Veronica. I can't imagine what wizard children must do to each other if they're taught spells so early. Sometimes I wish I could teach a few blocking spells or something but I know that Hermione would kill me for breaking one of the rules about Wizarding Pedagogy, so I do what I can teaching by example. We use their dolls and toys and make them fight, with my wand in my sleeve to add a little taste of what they can expect in their first scraps at their magical school someday._

_They both have some hand-magic, so your idea that most children have it to some extent before they're trained not to might be right. So I've taught them that they will only use that on their dolls and we have ripping big battles that we get into. Their parents have to call us over and over for dinner. _

_I'm afraid all the English vocabulary they're picking up is mostly battle terminology, except that we play at potions, too, using the ideas you sent me, though it would be so much more fun if you could show us. You wouldn't dare be so strict with girls of 5 and 8 as you were on me at 11! _

_We act out stories from the History of Magic—how could that class have been so boring? We have endless fun recreating all the battles. They seem to accept it on some instinctual level when I "apparate" their toys for them, and I'm afraid they're already paying closer attention to birds in case one ever brings them a message. They'll be the envy of their classmates once they understand it's all real. _

_One thing bothers me. Little Mathilde, the older girl, has no clear wand-hand preference and it gives her an unfair advantage over her sister when they're fighting. She actually has a lot of hand magic, and in general her magic is hard for her to control—it bursts from her without warning. The poor thing is just as scared as the rest of her family when she gets upset and breaks glasses, but I feel like the only help I've given her so far is to assure her it's not her fault. Should I be encouraging her to use one hand? Do you have any advice on channeling her magic? Engaging in muggle sport helps some, but I can't seem to explain the difference between herself, her magic and her emotions in terms an eight-year-old can understand. Please advise._

_The other night you were in my dreams and you were asking me to do something you've never mentioned being interested in before. The basics are reproduced below, but without any magical texts I can't fill in the blanks, or tell if this is really an interest you've been keeping from me. Please advise. _

Suddenly I remember where I am—an internet café in New Zealand. It takes all my concentration to picture the proprietor, a sour-faced woman in her early fifties, displacing 500 drams of Evermort solution, so that she will stop scrutinizing me for signs that I am up to no good on her muggle machine.

Calmer after the exercise, I tell Harry my own dreams. Now that we are in the privacy of our minds again, our appearances in each other's private worlds do take on a special significance. With He Who Shall Not Be Named safely in hell, these visits seem to be proof of something endogenous and real that has grown up between us.

_You've never noticed any difference in the way Mathilde handles the ball in sport, I suppose. Magical theory would have it that no one is completely ambidextrous, but you and I both know that rules are made to be broken. Pushing her in the wrong direction could be harmful for her, so I'd leave her the way she is for now, but observe closely._

_The matter of the fighting is not something I could really tell you about, as my methods with Veronica would hardly be suitable here. Are they fighting on the same side when you enact the passages from our history? The Great Insurrection of Ingerwold might be a good place to start teaching them about the follies of civil war, and I suppose you've found a way to mitigate some of the gore from the actual events. _

_In my dreams you are speaking French to me, perfect, liquid French, except you are doing so with your hands. It's odd, that your hands would produce a sound that vibrates through my core, but mon amant, you see that this dream of yours has its echo in my own, where your hands told me just the other night…._

"If I see you've been surfing someplace you shouldn't, I'm keeping your passport," the proprietress barks at me.

"Not at all madam," I say while hastily sending my message. "You will see I have merely sent one message from a reputable location, and I would appreciate your totting up my bill, as you say." My Julian identity has a bit of an accent in English, probably the adult version of the one I had when I arrived at Hogwarts. It seems to have a disarming effect on most people, and this lady is no exception.

"That'll be ten dollars, then," she says in a kinder tone, and hands me back the passport I'd hate to lose. Magical forgers can easily replicate muggle documents, and I knew enough of these individuals from my own years in the potions underworld to have a different passport for every day of the week. It's the _feel_ of a well-used thing like this one, imbued with the tedium and noise of travel, that's what would be hard to create without actually traveling through customs occasionally, as I have, and as my master forger has made it seem like I have done many times. She gave me some advice in exchange for the ultra-pure Polyjuice she relies upon for professional meetings with people other than old acquaintances, like me, who can see her magic through the disguise.

"Don't try too hard or people will notice. Just be yourself and remember that people don't pay attention to the world around them unless you make them do so."

So mostly my frenetic activity is accomplished with a calm interior, sure that my right to a future with Harry overrides all other concerns in a world that is unfairly set against us.

This time apart is actually essential for me and Harry: I don't know how we would have dealt with the supremely painful subject of Voldemort if we'd had to do it face to face. We want something real together: each of our lives is crying out for something authentic and trustworthy, but unfortunately, our beginning together was anything but simple. We can't help but wonder what was real out of those months during which we think we shared intimate personal revelations as well as the erotic inclinations we both know to be those of He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Bit by bit, Harry and I email and message each other and compare memories until we come upon something, a memory of me in the infirmary treating a patient who Harry had remembered as himself.

_But I'm sure I had Scabrous Eddy senior year! I remember the purple salve, and you arguing with Pomfrey._

_No, my love. Unless you had it when I was away and no one told me, which I doubt. Do you remember what it felt like?_

_Itchy? _

_No, it's a cold, creeping sensation such as one would never forget, take it from one who knows. This memory was clearly of me assisting in someone else's treatment._

Thus we realize that the true and the false are hopelessly entangled in our minds, because this memory of mine, in which I was treating some other student whose name now escapes me, was taken from my mind and put into Harry's, where it was pearled over until he recognizes it as truth.

Even after this realization, we continue to go through everything once, so we don't have to dwell on it again.

_Let's just agree we'll never know who said what, who thought what, or what would have happened without that bastard. There are so many things about magic we don't understand, but we still use it. That's the way I'm going to look at us._

_Severus?_

_Sev, are you there?_

_I can't type well enough to express all of my objections to your common-sense approach, and it's a waste of time anyway because I clearly agree with you. No one is making us write to each other from halfway around the world, and I hate to keep you up to dwell on the pain. Aren't you tired?_

_No, far from it. The Douays tease me about my late-night dates, and I have to do a calming charm if I message you when the girls are around. They get too curious when I'm so happy after talking to you._

_Well, mon amant, I am not sure the internet café proprietor in this town in Sri Lanka feels the same way about the inane grin I seem to wear when talking to you, so perhaps I should sign off._

_Will you be careful? And write soon?_

_You are with my every step, so there is no cause for concern. You can count on it._

And it's true. I am utterly relaxed on these journeys in poorly-mapped areas across Africa and Asia.

All of this assurance evaporates whenever Harry suggests that I come visit him in Versailles and meet this mixed magical-muggle adoptive family of his.


	40. Chapter 40

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 40: A Game

Yet another such suggestion is waiting for me in an internet cafe in Malaysia.

_Where's your mobile, Severus? I've been calling you._

The window pops up while I'm trying to give a description of the rare species of mole I've just talked to, and I curse myself for not learning how to turn off this feature that shows when I have the chat option on.

_Ah well,_ I type slowly, searching for an excuse for the contraption that stays at the bottom of my specimen satchel most of the time. _You remember that fantastically rare lichen I told you about?_

_Ugh, Sev, that's the third one you've let get eaten or worse by your specimens—I think I'm seeing a pattern here. So what days should I tell them to ask off for work? It's getting very close to Christmas and it's rude to not tell the Douays so they can plan accordingly._

_Mon amant, I don't see why it should be that big of an issue for them to take care of their own children for a couple of days._

_That's just it, the girls don't manage as well without me. I think they're going to get a sitter each while you visit. It's so weird to think that you haven't actually seen them yet when we've talked about them so often. I can't wait for you to meet them._

It touches me to hear Harry so excited about his work, but I can't help tapping out slowly, _Well, that's what I was hoping we could negotiate. I'm not sure about all that._

_Goodness, Sev, you'd think I was trying to take you home to meet my family. Except you knew them, so what's the problem here?_

The bile rises in my throat at the forbidden idea of James and Lilly knowing about my relationship with their son. Not caring who sees the keys tap on their own, my mind makes the following message pour out on the screen:

_If it had been up to me, your Douays wouldn't have known you had a boyfriend, but now they've had all this time to dream up this male companion of yours and even as Julian I'm quite a bit older. They're sure to think it odd and I don't want to jeopardize this opportunity for you._

Harry also types more quickly when he is annoyed:  
><em>Merlin's BEARD, how many times do I have to tell you? There's enough of my life that I have to hide either because of your safety or the International Code of Magical Secrecy. But last time I checked, the gays don't have any equivalent sort of code, so I refuse to conceal anything about my sexuality. You make me so furious with your misplaced decorum. Your grandmother would be so proud you've lived up to your Old Family's expectations of keeping the dirty bits under wraps.<em>

The unfair reference to my Old Family never fails to rankle, but before I can retort in kind, I consider: I'm in a relationship with the Savior of Wizarding-kind. My grand-mère could hardly ask for a better catch for me, homosexual or no. In my imagination I can just see her name-dropping my partner's identity to all and sundry:

_"Yes, well, Severus didn't turn out quite right, but he is in a state of concubinage with The Boy Who Lived."_

My snort rouses the people at the computer stations on either side of me and I can see Harry is filling up the screen with his disdain for my fears. _All right, all right. I'm coming on Boxing Day. There's someone waiting to use this contraption, so I have to go. _

_All right, whatever._

_I can't wait to see you. _

And it's true. I can't wait. But there's nothing I want less than to have to make small talk with a couple of muggles with Harry's magic performing its magic upon me. That's why I've been avoiding that telephone, and why I'd hoped to send Harry a message begging off from my visit sometime when he wasn't online.

During these months of travel I've gotten used to holding my transfiguration steady, but it's much more difficult with Harry because he's inside me, worming his way through my shield, thawing all the parts of myself that have been frozen forever. I don't want that layer of falsehood between us though he can't see or feel it.

And no, I don't want to be scrutinized as this mystery boyfriend and then see how this reflects on their understanding of Harry, whom they idolize for his effect as their children's caregiver.

Handily avoiding Christmas and its prospect of sharing muggle rituals with these people ("they're not 'these people, they're the Douays,'" I hear Harry's voice in my head), I apparate to the hotel Harry has chosen for being not far from the neighborhood where he lives. The déjà vu from our first time in a hotel together—our first time—has me oddly frightened. Except this time Harry is waiting for me.

With the covers up to his chin and wearing, as I discover with a moment's investigation, only a broad grin.

We spend hours living out what we've rehearsed in our recent dreams.

I enjoy Harry's much-improved French.

Only afterwards does it occur to me that this is not vocabulary he would have been practicing with the Douays. "Where did you learn those words?" I demand, scandalized at any one of a number of possibilities that would have granted him perfect pronunciation of such terms.

"The Rosetta Ring doesn't censor itself," Harry reminds me as he wraps himself around my back while we lie on our sides. "I've been throwing up a silencing charm in my room every night so I could repeat the pronunciation."

And we laugh at the picture of a studious Harry, intently reproducing the most delightful smut, over and over again in anticipation of this moment.

He looks so well, so much better than the last time I saw him, that I can't bear to put him in too much danger and jeopardize his job with another grave illness. Feigning a ravenous hunger, I insist we go out to eat rather than continue our infinite act of re-acquaintance. Harry can't stop talking over our meal, telling me about the "little witches," as he calls them privately, reminding me of things he'd like me to look out for about their magic, his partially rekindled friendship with Hermione and Ron…

If I weren't dreading meeting the parents, I would have been perfectly happy watching him radiate happiness from the nearly-deserted Asian restaurant at holiday time in Versailles.

We go to sleep relatively early in a chaste embrace. And we sleep, both of us, the whole night through, and waking together early in the morning to a heavy snow still falling outside the window.

"I thought you could feel the weather coming?" Harry asks from the window. Suddenly the still silence and deserted streets last night make sense. Everyone else has been listening to the weather report and knew the storm was coming.

"Let's go outside!" Harry's clothes are already half on.

"Yes, I'm the older man who's corrupting your children's caregiver; it's ever so nice to meet you," is the black thought that's been blotting out everything else in my mind for several days, so no, I didn't notice this white blot on the horizon. Harry practically has to dress me himself, but soon we're out in the foot-and-a-half that's already on the ground, with more falling every minute.

Harry is pulling me along to what is usually a small park, I vaguely remember, but right now it's covered in enough snow to make it seem new and mysterious, as if it remade itself just for us. It's so early that no one has tracked across the white expanse. The temperature is bitter cold, so perhaps all intelligent folk are inside.

It may just be the snow slowing me down, but I feel as though my feet are coated in lead. For some reason I can't get the image of Aunt Adele and my grandmother out of my mind, as if that is who is waiting to see me in a little while and not a couple of muggles. My Pure-blood relations would not take the comparison kindly—

The snowball hits me hard across the side of the head.

"Harry!" Damn him for being inside my shield!

"You've not paid attention to a word I've said for ten minutes. I'm going to find a spell to make my own snow and hit you on the head with a snowball every time you start obsessing like that."

He brings his other hand out from behind his back and hits me again.

"What is the meaning of this?" I splutter.

His impish laugh is the only answer and he scoops up more snow.

Looking quickly around at the deserted plaza, I use my magic to pelt him from all sides, like I used to with cloth balls when we were training together at Hogwarts.

"No fair!" Smarter than he was as a student, he runs towards me so that I can't hit him without hitting myself. He tackles me to the ground.

"Oh, so that's how you're going to play, is it?" I pant, discovering that being simultaneously aroused and freezing in the snow is a strange feeling. "No dirty tricks," I admonish when Harry's hand sneaks inside my coat.

"No magic," he challenges. "Fair fight?" He stumbles to his feet.

"I'd like to see it, from the likes of you," I shout to his back.

We're running around in the beginnings of a blizzard, the only two people on earth, occasionally grabbing on to a coat or leg and grinding each other's faces into the snow like a couple of kids.

Suddenly we hear a shout.

I whip my head to the sound and see a familiar sight out of the corner of my eye.

My hair.

Composing my transfiguration hastily, I take the hand that Harry offers to help me up and watch him flinch at my form when he takes off his glasses to wipe the coating of snow.

"Is that you, Harry?" comes the voice.

Two bundled figures are approaching slowly through the snow.

"Madame Douay?" He puts on his glasses and relaxes.

"We came to offer you a ride on our way back from getting some emergency food. It's going to be a blizzard and we thought you'd not like to ride your bicycle all that way."

They're looking at the two grown men who were just having a snowball fight. "Is this?"

"This is S-Julian," Harry says proudly and puts his arm around me.

"Very pleased to meet you," I say stiffly and he squeezes my arm, hard, while I shake hands with the muggles, who introduce themselves.

"Cecily, or Cecile, if you prefer," comes the good solid English voice that I find strangely comforting. "Harry refuses to let me speak English, but I assume you have fewer scruples."

"We've heard so much about you," Edouard says in French without a trace of discomfort, taking off his glove to shake my hand.

"Please come with us before we get stuck," Cecily says warmly in French, and before I can think of a reasonable objection we are all running to their automobile so they can drive us to the hotel, where they insist I check out so I can wait out the storm with them.

Harry kicks my leg over and over in triumph on the slow ride back while I do my best to answer their questions about my research.

"Harry is always telling us that you're emailing him from the most exotic places. If it's not Kuala Lumpur it's some place I've never heard of," Cecily gushes, and Harry's lip quivers with the message that I'd better get used to the stream of words flowing in two languages from this blonde lady that emerged from the winter wrappings once we got in the car. Her bohemian beaded earrings and shawl contrast with the sturdy English features of her face.

"Yes, I am on sabbatical studying medicinal plants, but I am also interested in animals and insects as well."

"Well, that's just fascinating. I do like to garden, but the girls aren't old enough to be interested and before Harry came into our lives I didn't have five minutes to spend on much more than a little plot." She stops long enough to beam at Harry. "You'll find that the girls have taken to him as much as he's taken to them."

"He talks of nothing else," I manage to get in, and then Harry kicks me as a reminder of the other half to this half-truth.

"Mathilde and Sophie have been working on some sort of play for you," Edouard interjects. He has medium brown hair cut short to prevent what looks like a decided curl. He's approximately my (apparent) age, and I'm not sure if that makes us more likely allies or less, considering that Harry is so unlike this settled family man who works for the government in some capacity. "Neither they nor Harry will say what it's about, but knowing our children it will be very imaginative."

This time I kick Harry over what's sure to be an amusing mixture of magical lore.

The snow is falling so hard we all but inch our way down the drive, and I allow myself to be shooed into a muggle house whose contours are obscured by the downpour of white.

"Stop adding the adjective 'muggle' to everything, dimwit. Everything in your life is going to be muggle from now on," I'm chastising myself as I take off the heavy coat I thought to fetch from my seaside house on my way back from Asia.

"Here let me take that," the mu- Cecily says. "Oh, didn't you have a scarf?"

I look at her blankly.

"I thought I saw a long black scarf when you were, um, playing in the snow," she giggles.

"Oh, yes, I think I lost it somewhere. It's of no consequence."

The children are already swarming around Harry. I spend a few minutes of intense concentration calibrating my shield so that if it ever occurs to them to touch me, they will be diverted to do something else. Dumbledore was a master at this sort of thing when he didn't want to be bothered at Hogwarts, and I went so far as to appear in his grate the other day to ask him exactly how he did it. He had a good laugh at being caught out in this practice that, to be fair, is essential for a little privacy when surrounded by several hundred people all the time.

The old man and I exchanged our gifts. This year I made him a special shoe polish that will turn ordinary boots into the fabled Seven League Boots.

"You can apparate, of course, but I've been experimenting with this method as I've been traveling around some of the most beautiful spots in the world," I tell him from the grate. "You miss so much by apparating. And they'll just let you step across the channel at Dover. You could easily visit Harry if you like."

"You're always so thoughtful," Albus says, and gives me some more books about how I can keep from eating the young man in question to death.

"Mathilde, Sophie, I want you to meet my friend, S-Julian," Harry says in English to the two girls who are half-hiding behind him. "Say what we practiced."

"Pleased to meet you, Julian," the girls say in chorus and then immediately switch back to French.

"Look at our castle!" Sophie, the five-year-old, says.

"I want to show him," Mathilde interjects crossly, elbowing her sister aside.

"Hey!" Sophie sticks her tongue out.

Harry takes the girls' hands. "Let's all show Julian what we've been building."

In no time at all the four of us are engrossed in playing with the miniature Hogwarts Harry has constructed using blocks and dolls and other odds and ends. My eyes get misty watching them together. These girls are Harry's whole world—a world that's nothing short of a miracle after having his life shattered as he did. And as was true for the serious child I was once, Harry and the girls all play very seriously, we two adults nudging each other occasionally at all in-jokes.

I have perhaps never seen magic so clearly as when I look in those children's faces and see it, a second set of eyes, ancient and proud, staring at the knowledge being shared with them under the guise of a game. This extra sense vibrates to this truth, it recognizes it as a legacy it has been waiting for.

Harry and I vie to add in toy stand-ins for all his professors and complete the Forbidden Forest with magical animals. The girls watch, wide-eyed, at the two grown men arguing.

"This is Professor McGonagall," he declares, choosing a pleasant looking doll.

"No, I think you mean this one," I substitute a misshapen stuffed cat.

"She's head of the best house," he snaps.

"You didn't know Minerva like I did," I reply, and use a bit of hand magic to knock his doll over. Mathilde stares at me for a moment and then the children have brought more dolls to join in the fun.

We have adventures that are resolved with the use of tiny sticks and learn the proper way to greet a hippogriff until the girls run around the house bowing at everything. Harry learns some French. The girls learn English. And I learn about a pleasure that had seemed impossible for me: that of spending a snowy day inside with two little girls and enjoying the way they laugh at me and my Harry and our secret world that will soon be theirs.

"There's plenty to eat in the kitchen. We're going over to the neighbor's," calls Cecily.

"All right, we'll be fine," calls Harry. We nod at each other and then each take a girl to a different room. As I whispered to him shortly after my arrival, the younger one, Sophie, has pink magic, which is near to Harry's own. They have a much closer rapport than he can manage with Mathilde, who is a golden orange. He is glad to be able to devote all his attention to the English-language guessing games and scavenger hunts that are both age-appropriate and more suited to Sophie's nature, which seems to lend itself towards problem-solving, just like Harry.

Left alone with me, Mathilde stares openly and I suddenly feel reduced to the size of a flea. Children are so regal compared to adults, especially this adult. For something to do, I retreat to the familiar.

"Let's play a game," I hazard.

This eight-year-old girl looks at me skeptically but gives me a chance to sink or swim without her help.

Rapidly, I scan the natural properties in my environment and move faster than any muggle could to assemble: a sprig from a wreath of woven lavender, an almond from a dish, and the remains of a cup of milk, which are put to one side. A pepper fetched from the refrigerator, a leaf from a pot of rosemary growing indoors, and a wood-louse plucked with inhuman precision from among the firewood are all placed to the other side.

More curious about my movements than their intention, Mathilde suddenly remembers we're supposed to be playing at something. "What is this game?" she asks with a heavy layer of sulkiness over the interest I can feel. This poor girl is in the habit of being unhappy and she doesn't know why.

"Close your eyes," I order, and she closes them. "Tell me what color this thing is I'm holding over your hand."

She opens one eye and sees the almond. "It is brown," she drawls in English. "This is a baby game."

"No, ma petite, this is pink." When she vehemently disagrees she is surprised that I merely wait for her to finish. "If you close your eyes, you will begin to see."

We spend perhaps twenty minutes with her practicing with the different test substances, and I can't tell if she's getting more right than any person would by randomly guessing. Feeling more disappointed than I would have expected, we move seamlessly into playing at a rather bloodthirsty battle between two dolls. Then she wants to color so she does that in silence, and I watch her use either hand with the crayon, as Harry had told me she did. Then I read one of the books Albus gave me, spelled to look like a harmless novel to prying eyes.

Feeling a round failure, I scarcely notice that the girl isn't in the room.

Hermès! What is she getting into under my care?

In the kitchen I find her rifling the spices out of the pantry. She emerges with cardamom, cream of tartar and a small sack of buckwheat.

"Quelle couleur?" she asks me.

"Orange," I whisper. Of course she would feel this color most intensely.

At random I pick a jar of thyme. "Quelle couleur?"

"Bleu?"

"Parfait ma princesse," I kiss an inch away from her head.

She looks up at me, smiling uncertainly at the praise she probably gets all too seldom.

We spend one of the most meaningful half-hours of my life ransacking the pantry and practicing the nearly lost art of Magical Categorization.

When the parents' footsteps are heard crunching up the drive, I say, "Go pick up your toys" and use my magic to push the little girl off towards the parlor where we were playing. In a moment the pantry is organized as it once was, with everything neatly stacked according to some muggle logic on the shelves.

When the Douays come in red-cheeked and sniffling from the cold they find me emerging from a little-used area that was once a porch but had been enclosed to make some sort of workspace that had ended up as a storage area.

"How is it out there?" I ask, with my hands full.

"Freezing, absolutely frigid. And the wind, it bites down to your bones!" Cecily says.

"I was just putting the kettle on." Emptying what's in my hands on the counter I set the water to boil.

"That's fine, though we've been having something a bit stronger," Edouard says, clapping me on the back while I force myself not to flinch at the unusual contact. "How are things here?"

"Mathilde and I have been coloring," I say and we all look to where the little girl is unwrapping the labels from her crayons. "We have had a fine time, have we not, ma petite?" I call.

"I like Julian, can we keep him?" she says unexpectedly. "Come help me with the colors."

"In a moment," I reply and turn to Cecily. "This lavender and rose hips I found in your workroom, you don't mind if I use a little for an herbal tea?"

"Oh that? Please do; we've made all the Christmas sachets we're going to make for another year."

"They're from your garden, with nothing harmful used in the growing process?" I ask, though of course I would have felt that with my hands.

"Yes, I'm surprised the roses did so well this year; it's not easy to grow them without harsh chemicals." She's rummaging in a drawer and emerges with a tea ball and a mesh sieve. "With me in school now I have so little time for gardening."

Edouard comes down the stairs with an extra sweater and joins us in the play area. The Douays watch while the girl and I begin silently separating her toys according to material. The plastic items are usually a yellow, the wooden toys are green, and so on, with me trying to introduce things into the wrong pile so she can correct me and her writing the names of things with the crayon of the appropriate magical color.

The kettle shrieks and I go into the kitchen to make the cups of Orange tea—both lavender and most varieties of roses being noted Orange substances—that I suspect will do the girl good. Her father follows me in.

"You realize no one can get her to sit for this long," he says quietly. "She has terrible trouble at school with the other children because she can't stay still. We've been considering putting her on medication."

My fist clenches at the idea of medicating away Mathilde's magic.

"I am of a nervous temperament myself, and my mother, who was a very gifted herbalist, used to give me things like herbal teas to sort of even me out," I say, bringing the cups into the parlor. Of course, my mother gave me much more sophisticated compounds, but if I were of an Orange nature she would have certainly used these common herbs as a base sooner or later.

And we adults sit while Mathilde and I have our tea, the girl's sweetened with honey. She colors quietly and they tell me about the primary school and all the trials such a setting poses for a very active girl.

"How do you like the very special tea I chose just for you?" I ask the girl.

"Very much, thank you," she finishes the liquid and goes back to her quiet games, but not without giving me a special look.

It's the look in her eyes that finally does me in.

Harry finds me in the lavatory weeping.

"Did I just hear Mathilde call something yellow, purple? Severus, that's just going to confuse her; she's already got enough to handle with learning English! And her problems at school—the children will make fun of her! Why did you—" He sees my reddened eyes.

"I was younger, younger than her age." My voice breaks. "I never thought I'd be able to teach the Paracelsan method to anyone. Not before they were so old their brains would have a hard time accepting it. But she looked at me as if to say, 'of course it's orange, moving on.'"

My lover folds me in his arms. "I've got to get back to the little witches, but you take as long as you need."

My eight-year-old friend and I are inseparable for the next day and a half.

"We've never seen her take to anyone like she has to you, Julian. She's not had a tantrum once." Cecily watches her older daughter play by herself with the magic castle.

It's hard to resist the urge to try and enter Mathilde's mind and tell her they're not tantrums. A youngster her age picks up on being treated like there's something wrong with her, and then it takes a lifetime of undoing.

"Would you mind if I were to take her for a walk? The snow seems to have stopped for now."

"No, of course, getting outside would probably do you both good." Madame Douay bundles up the little girl while I fetch my winter things, and we emerge into the white world that is the back yard leading out into a field that must usually be a playground.


	41. Chapter 41

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 41: A Rare Species of Calm

When the child moves to grasp on to my sleeve I nudge her hand to the tail of my wool jacket. Such proximity carries basically no risk and is less dangerous than the girl falling on a hidden branch.

Away from the house with its competing energy and doting parents it's easier to think about the delicate operation ahead of me. "Mathilde." I tip her hooded head up from where she's stomping her footprints in the snow. "Mathilde. I am going to show you something. You see I am your friend, and I am Harry's friend, yes?"

Reaching into the past to access the full-body magic I've seldom used, I stand in front of the girl in a certain pose. It's nothing anyone else would be able to see, but as expected she starts giggling and clapping her hands.

"Uncle Julian, you're funny."

"See there, now, you feel happy, don't you?" Her body has unconsciously relaxed into a similar posture.

She stops laughing, her young mind trying to understand why her feelings changed so suddenly.

"Now show me how you stand when you feel angry."

Mathilde looks at me uncertainly.

"Let's say I took your dolls away and gave them all to your sister. Or I made you stay in your room while everyone else had a good time." (These "time outs" are her usual punishment, according to Harry.)

It's beginning to work.

"No, it's not fair! They never do this to Sophie! Why do they pick on me?" She stomps her small foot and assumes the shape I've seen her in several times during my stay. With this scowl on her face she is suddenly an altogether formidable child, and it's no wonder her parents are at their wits' end.

"Watch closely."

I stand in the same position and the sheer force of it almost knocks her over, literally, so I must catch her with my hand magic so she doesn't fall in the snow. "This is how one stands when one is angry. You can see why people are frightened, yes? And you get punished."

"They say I throw things but I don't." Mathilde's sullen façade is gone and all of her childish confusion is rising to her face.

I kneel down in the snow to eye level. "You don't mean to. Do you know I was the same when I was your age?"

She regards me with wide eyes.

"Very much the same," I assure her in my most comforting voice, omitting my deadly condition that she is thankfully spared. She just has a startling amount of magic for a small child.

"Is Harry like you too?"

"In some ways, yes. But he wants to help. You should talk to him about anything, anything at all. He may not be able to answer all your questions, but he if he can't he'll show you without words. But for now, walk with me and I will tell you some other things you should know."

As we walk with eight-year-old steps across the snow-covered playground. I tell her everything. Everything that Harry would have told her if he weren't under the agreement required by Hermione's program to respect the arbitrary eleventh-birthday revelation of the magical world. Me, I am under no such oath, so I explain that Harry's games are much more than that. I float a foot off the ground to illustrate my point.

It wouldn't do to keep her out too long, so I have just enough time to explain what magic is, and that she has to wait until she is eleven to learn how to do anything interesting with her power. Throughout the whole speech I'm careful not to use any words such as "witch" or "wizard" that her childish intelligence will grab on to and start misusing or attracting attention with. "Magic" is all right because it's a childhood commonplace. If she chooses to extract something from, "This thing that we can do," or "this other world that is yet in this world" she lacks the vocabulary and the subtlety to transmit anything more than vagueness.

"Sophie is this way too?" The distaste is in her voice again.

"Yes, she is, and hear something you will come to understand: that just because someone is different than you, doesn't mean that they're not just as talented. Sophie remembers everything, doesn't she? Books, things you say?"

"Yes," she says sulkily. "She's always talking and asking questions."

"Sophie will probably have certain talents as you get older, things you will admire." Mathilde looks skeptical, but I can envision Sophie being gifted at charms like a James. "But let me show you something that only very few people can do." I take off my gloves and generate some magic between my two hands, which warms them enough so that I don't mind the cold. "It's all right. Take off your mittens."

She does so and hides her hands under her arms.

"No, hold your hands like this, and move back and forth, left, right."

Though I've seen clear signs of hand magic in the child, the usual method of building up magic isn't working for her, so I give her my ball of energy.

"Oh, that, I can do that." She throws the ball of magic back to me and makes her own.

Of course. Her supporter hand is overdeveloped. She wouldn't need to move it back and forth.

"This is special?" she asks as we toss our magics back and forth.

"Very, very special, Mathilde. Hold onto it and keep your hands warm while you tell me again why you mustn't speak of this with anyone but Harry."

"Because most people won't understand and I've already had enough of that," she repeats with a mature air.

"Very good," I chuckle at this severe little creature. I've been warming her with some of my magic but we've probably been out too long already. "Do you have any more questions before we go back?"

"Are you Harry's wife?" Mathilde asks and I freeze.

"Of course not, why would you ask such a thing?"

Because he called you his compagne," she giggles.

"Oh," I laugh casually. "You know Harry's French is not very good." Another shortcoming in the Hogwarts curriculum is that lack of languages. For Harry, learning a gendered language as an adult is challenging. "He must have meant compagnon, because we share a flat in London when I am not traveling." The subtleties of the words for gay partner are new to me as well, but I am sure that compagnon can mean roommate. "Now we ought to go back, so throw some snow at me so they will think that's all we are doing."

She throws one snowball, then another. Then another. I'm happy to say that another way in which this little girl is different than me is that her aim is impeccable. I let her have her fun while trying to determine which of her hands is the dominant. But this fierce child seems to throw just as well with either hand.

With a movement of my hands several dozen snowballs rise up from the ground and are halfway towards her. Mathilde reflexively moves her arms to block her face.

The right one is ahead of the left. She's right-handed. Just.

"Did you really think I would do this to you?" I ask and she gapes at the snow poised in midair and then falling to the ground. "You have done very well, Mathilde, let's go back inside and perhaps we can get some hot chocolate."

She holds onto my coattail, and her magic feels noticeably more balanced. Was it the lesson in moving magic around her body, or the lesson on the wizarding world? Both these sets of hidden facts were making her ill by trying to assert themselves into her childlike mind with no help at all from the rest of her existence.

We're both smiling when we enter the warm house, stomping the snow off our feet.

By the time we are in the kitchen, she runs to give her mother a hug. "Did you have a good time with Julian?" Cecily asks as she helps her off with her outdoor things.

"Yes, he said I could have some hot chocolate." She gives me a sly look behind her mother's back, knowing that she did well to say nothing else.

Her mother laughs and starts the hot water. "She wasn't too much of a bother?"

"No, I was telling her about Borneo and the animals there. She told me about the animals here. I believe you have rabbits," I improvise, remembering that there were some rabbit tracks in the snow.

"That's right. Julian knows lots of things." Mathilde says, now in her stocking feet. She takes my coat and climbs on a chair to put it on a hook, a helpful gesture that surprises her mother.

As a matter of fact, many things surprise Madame Douay after my conversation with her older daughter. The girl looks visibly calmer. She fights with her sister less, seems to push her parents less. All of that becomes especially apparent over time. But what does get their immediate notice is the rapt attention with which little Mathilde observes my every move.

Indoors we play as if we were throwing the imaginary snowball, when we're really throwing a ball of magic. I challenge her to throw with only her right hand and then catch with both, moving it back and forth between the left and the right. That is, building up her wand hand and balancing her hand magic as Aunt Adele should have cared enough to teach me when I was a child.

It reminds me of being very small and feeling myself to be on pins and needles all the time, not just because of the misery in my house, but because there was no one to help teach me balance. Mathilde doesn't have to tell me she feels relieved. I can feel her relief. Someone has acknowledged this frightful itch and helped her scratch it.

Harry comes in from his trip visiting a local sledding spot with the husband and Sophie and immediately sees the difference. He brings his cup of coffee in and watches Mathilde play with me until the two girls run off to work on the performance they've been planning for the grownups. I sit down on the couch and Harry risks a quick squeeze of my hand.

"I knew you two would get on but this is incredible. Is she left-handed?" He whispers.

"No, right-handed. I nearly dumped an avalanche of snow on her and she blocked with the right just ahead of the left."

"You mean she knows?" he asks, shocked.

"Yes, and you see how well the knowledge suits her." His two charges come running into the room with some dolls and a pile of dress-up clothes. They rehearse companionably with no squabbling, and Harry looks at my raised eyebrow and nods, acknowledging the wisdom of my risky strategy. Mathilde looks up just then and takes two dolls. "This is Julian, and he can fly." She hands the toy to Harry. "Can you fly?"

"Yes, I can, as a matter of fact." With a smirk my companion takes a doll and makes it ride on a stick from the fireplace and we fly together. Mathilde nods, satisfied, and that's all that needs to be said about where she ought to place Harry within her new cosmogony.

Would that we could all accommodate the truth as easily as children can!

The next day it snows again, an angry, windy kind of snow, and is not good to go out. Instead, everyone stays inside and we pass the day happily. Madam Douay is pleased to see me interested in her sometimes-strange hybrids of English, French and Indian cuisine. This cheerful woman is open to my gentle suggestions for balancing out the flavors based upon what is entirely my science and not any special experience with cooking. At my home by the sea I throw fish and whatever else is handy into a pot and call it stew.

That evening after the girls have done their play (full of magical subtext that has Harry and me nudging each other), they are put to bed and the adults sit by the fire. The shutters rattle in the wind.

"So nice to be inside," says Edouard, putting his arm around Cecily.

After a moment, Harry puts his arm around me. The only ripple of interest is that it isn't the other way around and everyone goes back to looking at the fire and conjecturing how much snow has fallen by now. They put on the radio low so that they can keep track of any weather advisories, and Harry resumes what seems to be a never-ending debate about politics with the husband.

"I have an excellent wine that I've been saving up," Edouard offers. "Harry, would you mind helping me fetch the glasses?"

While they are gathering the wine things, Madame Douay bursts out, "What you and Harry have done for my girls is nothing short of magical."

"No, Cecile, not at all," I demur, a smile playing on my lips.

"No, it's true. Harry is such a talented teacher. And to think that he's been through so much. The head of his program, Ms. Granger, said that he was valedictorian, with a bright future ahead of him, and then nearly died of meningitis and had such a long recovery. How dreadful!"

I suppose being The Boy Who Lived is a rough equivalent of a valedictorian at Hogwarts. "Yes, Harry has had a long road to travel, but I must thank you and Edouard for the home you have offered him. He would be an excellent instructor and perhaps a designer of his own curriculum some day when he completes school."

"Oh, he would, he would, and he would make an excellent parent," Cecily gushes and then Harry and Monsieur Douay return with a bottle of wine and glasses. They both give me a look that assumes she's been saying something indiscreet.

"I was just going to tell Julian that both he and Harry are so gifted with the girls it's a shame they can't have any of their own."

Monsieur Douay nods as if he expected she would say something like this sooner or later. "And if they decide to take on parenting someday I'm sure they will be excellent at it," he says, pouring the wine.

Harry kicks me and I realize I've gone rigid.

"With all that leftover lavender, have you considered using it in potatoes?" I ask the wife.

"No, why would I ever do that?" she asks.

"Lavender makes a nice substitute for rosemary, so it works well with lamb as well."

And then a much less sensitive conversation ensues about the properties of different spices and moves naturally to gardening. Thank goodness Madame Douay has no more interest in politics than I, or I would be condemned to trying to follow the tedium that has Harry and Edouard raising their voices that have been relaxed by the wine.

Eventually our hosts take off to bed. "Good night," they say. "Put another log on the fire if you want."

Finally alone in my guest room, Harry draws me down onto the bed. "I've never been so proud of you as I am seeing what you are able to do with Mathilde," he says into my unfurled hair. "I'm only worried that the Douays are going to want a better explanation for what you did to calm her down. What did you do?"

"That little eight-year-old has more magic than is good for her, Harry. I shudder to think what would have happened if she'd had to wait another three years to find out what she was feeling so intensely. You didn't tell me they were thinking of medicating her!. Hermès, medicating away her magic: what a tragedy! What will these muggles louse up next? I've given her exercises and told her she can talk with you about anything but you may have to show her in response."

We talk excitedly for some minutes about ways to channel the girl's energy.

"Let's start a primary school for magical children!" Harry exclaims suddenly.

"I'm afraid Hermione has already beat you to it. She's been working on just such a project for two years."

"No, we should do it our own way," Harry bounds on the bed. "I could teach them to be sensible and fight and do charms, and you could teach them their colors the wrong way around. Can't you just see yourself directing a bunch of little kids to fight beetles the way you've shown me the magical properties?"

For once my naysaying is overcome by excitement at the idea. Teaching young ones the right way to do things before they've already become hardened against it! Legions of tiny boys and girls learning the Paracelsan method over their pint-sized cauldrons! Wordlessly I shiver with happiness within Harry's arms, and he feels my agreement. He feels all of me.

"I know we agreed not to exchange gifts, but I've been working on something. Consider it an experiment." Harry reaches for his wand.

We've been sparing with our use of magic during intimate moments, worried as we are about all the falsehood that got introduced into our sexual relations from the start. But this night, Harry utters a charm that is just perfect. He makes me light as a feather so that I can float where he puts me without his having to support my weight.

There is an unusual warm, deep resonance to our joined flesh this night. A rare species of calm beginning on the level of the skin and sinking deep, deeper than ever. When I kiss him I taste cocoa and snow and wood smoke and normalcy. I float in the air and he clasps me so that I bear him up. We swim miles together, joined that way, and it is as though the horizon keeps moving farther and farther as we travel, because part of the pleasure is in making plans for a beckoning future as we indulged in earlier.

It's something neither I nor my lover has ever had the luxury of doing: planmaking. But tonight for the first time it is as though we are a part of society, rather than against it, as we couple in this bed that these muggles know full well is being used for this purpose and don't seem to care one bit. Perhaps they wouldn't like Severus Snape making love to their au pair so much, but the fact that they like the fictional version of us, the Harry and Julian pseudo-muggle-couple version, puts us one foot within society, which is one more than we've ever had together.

The next day Harry and I get up early but still only have a few minutes to lie in bed together before we have to get up so that the girls don't see him coming out of my room.

"What was Cecily saying to you while I was out of the room last night?" Harry asks with one leg flung over mine.

"She was going on about your tragic bout of meningitis, so sad for a young man of such promise to be set back several years." He stiffens at what we know to be a more insidious battle that is not yet won. "I assured her that you were a valedictorian and then some."

His body relaxes. "I was getting an earful too from Edouard."

"Yes?"

"He told me that he wished his brother had found someone like I've found you. He had a brother who was gay, you know."

"No, I didn't, and if you'd thought to tell me, perhaps I wouldn't have felt so self-conscious." That one fact would have saved me weeks of dread!

"He also told me that he's learned from his marriage that Cecily has her moods, but he has to let her work things out for herself sometimes. That I shouldn't hold on too tight."

"He compared me to this prattling woman?" I am offended, not so much by Madame Douard's gender as I am by her sheer chattiness, which seems utterly alien.

"Well, the two of you were exchanging recipes last night and I thought it was adorable," Harry pokes me.

"I was merely drawing upon my magical knowledge to suggest ways to balance out her casseroles. Paracelsus himself would wonder why she puts ginger in everything!"

He rubs his leg against mine soothingly. "If we ever have a house someday, I hope you know you'd have to do the cooking, and not because of anything other than me being a disaster in the kitchen."

"Speaking of, we should get down there before the girls do. Put on your spectacles." And I transfigure and join Harry in the kitchen in a few minutes. We've already made plans for the day when Mathilde wakes up sick.

Madame Douay is examining the little girl while Harry feeds Sophie her breakfast.

"It looks like just a fever so far," Cecily says. "In this weather it's not surprising."

"I hope I didn't keep her out too long yesterday," I say automatically, but my mind is churning with a different sort of guilt.

"Oh, no, Mathilde hasn't been sick once this winter, so I think she had it coming," our hostess pours me some tea. "She looks worn out, poor thing, so hopefully she can rest up and avoid anything like the chest cold she had last Christmas."

"Excuse me for a moment," I say and walk casually to my room. In a moment the trident is cast.

My hands are tinged with a golden orange.

Harry knocks on my door to find me with my head in my criminal hands.

"Children get sick all the time," he begins and then we hear Mathilde's voice calling him.

When he returns a few minutes later his face is livid.

"She had a nosebleed," he spits and then throws up a silencing charm around us.

"Cast it." I look at him dumbly. "Cast that thing; I want to see."

The trident shows my hands tinged with the irrefutable proof of my theft, and he gags. "She's only a child!"

"I thought we established that I have a condition," I say with a calm that is far from what I feel. "At no point did I lay a finger on Mathilde, and what little I know about my curse is that skin-to-skin contact poses the greatest danger. It must be that the 'snowballs' of magic we have been throwing around were a stupid, dangerous way to illustrate the control of magical energy using raw energy, which is more direct than skin. My magic, as you know, tends to bond with another's—"

"You monster, if she gets any sicker, I'll take her to the nearest wizard hospital myself, and I'll tell them who did it to her."

"That is very wise. Perhaps you should owl Dumbledore and Hermione," I agree, already planning a new identity and packing my things.

"Wait, Severus, stop." Harry takes a deep breath. "Let's give it a day. If you've really not touched her at all—"

"If? And you think otherwise?" Now my voice is raised. "What precisely do you take me for? My only thought has been to help the girl. You can't begin to imagine what she's been going through not understanding why she does the things she does. You want her to spend another day being labeled a problem child? I can assure you, I know of such a case and it will only mean great pain later in life," I return, thinking of Lilly's difficult reintegration of her suppressed martial magic.

His arms are around me, but they leave me cold. "Stay, Severus, please."

With a gesture my bags are shrunken for traveling and then I remember muggles would expect me to have baggage, and they are resized.

"No, Harry. It's best if she's not exposed to me while she's weak. At any rate, I've probably given her enough to think about for a year, so my work is done. Keep her drinking the rose hip lavender tea."

"All right." Harry doesn't move out of where he's standing in the doorway. "Severus? We can adopt muggle children," he offers as a weak substitute to all of our plans from just the night before. But we both know that the palpable connection we feel with these two children is proof of our belonging more to the wizard world than muggle society, especially in my case.

"Say goodbye to Mathilde for me," I instruct. The idea of looking at her at this moment makes me sicker than she could ever be. And in no time at all I'm standing with my bags and a sack of cookies at the end of the long neighborhood street, where I say the taxicab will pick me up for my flight. Harry checked to make sure that the airport is indeed operational, and thus I am left to apparate as soon as there are no cars on the street.

Back at my seaside home, various caustic potions do nothing but peel the skin off, but at least that's some sort of justice, so I sit with my raw hands and listen to the birds catch me up on all the gossip.

A week later I'm in Brazil headed towards an extended sojourn in the rainforest, when I check my email for the first time since leaving Versailles.

To my surprise, there is a message from Cecily.

I just wanted to thank you again for whatever you did with Mathilde. She was only sick with one of those 24-hour bugs and then she was up and about, playing so nicely with Sophie! Sophie did seem a little under the weather for all of an afternoon, and Harry was sickly himself for a day or so but soldiered through and then he was fine. Thankfully Edouard and I were spared and everyone is back in fine form. Mathilde has asked after "Uncle Julian" several times and insisted that I send you this picture she drew, so here are some photos of the girls and Harry in the snow as well.

Harry has sent me his photos before, so I know how to open them. The flat muggle photographs hit me with the force of those beautiful, optimistic days. But I am unprepared for the rendition of Mathilde's drawing that slowly unfolds before me on a screen in the internet café in Manaus.

In childish script she has written "Happy," "Sad," "Excited," and "Scared." By each there is a crayon squiggle, meaningless to almost anyone else.

They're rough renditions of the full-body magic stances for each emotion.

It hurts me to think of all that I could do for this exceptionally bright and talented girl, if I could only keep from hurting her in the process.

Instead, I buy two dolls made by the local Amazonian tribes and send them by muggle post to France along with a letter addressed to both the girls, describing some of the wonders of the local flora and fauna. This becomes a ritual when I travel, and Harry says that "Uncle Julian's" packages are thoroughly enjoyed.

Our correspondence is distant for some time after that. Claiming a busy travel schedule I don't check for messages very often, and Harry has more than enough to keep him busy.

This was the first time he really sided against me, and I'm still smarting from the experience. He knows this, but I doubt he can help his protective reaction either, especially since he identifies so strongly with anyone who's been victimized by someone more powerful.

Seeing what turned out to be a single nosebleed in a little girl hasn't made him feel more warmly about my effects on his own system, I'm sure.

This new evidence of my dangerous constitution is jarring enough that it forces me to make some inquiries I'd been putting off.


	42. Chapter 42

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 42: Surprises

Er, this certainly counts as a surprise," Harry says on this day, well into the spring we left behind in the Northern Hemisphere. He's surveying the boat dubiously. "I had no idea you knew anything about sailing."

"I don't," I reply with the false smile that has been on my face since we apparated to Chile yesterday. "I just assumed you'd rather travel in a craft controlled by my magic than cling to my back while I swam around Easter Island."

The lover I haven't seen since just after Christmas makes a noise of disgust in his throat.

"Severus, this is not the good kind of surprise. You promised you would quit collecting your specimens for five minutes and just enjoy our first week in months." He's climbing into the boat, interested despite himself. "Can I steer?"

"I was hoping you would," I say, willing him to stop asking questions. The sun is going down and finally the shore is deserted enough for us to attempt a magical launch of a muggle ship, something that is accomplished only after much swearing in assorted languages.

"You don't need a map?" Harry has the presence of mind to ask when we've almost left the shore behind. "Is this a good idea?"

"No, and no," I whisper into the rough sea air. Actually, the boat hovers over the waves because it's easier than fighting with the currents, so we fly towards one of the remotest islands in the world.

Over the past several months I've visited many wise men and women, some of whom turned out to be quacks, some of whom turned their magic on me, unnerved by my odd qualities, and some of whom were more or less polite. This is one journey that I could have taken some time back when the birds reported this avenue to me, but I've been afraid to do it on my own. All of my many pressing questions eventually won out, however, and it seemed like a way to prove my intentions to find a livable solution for us—a way to try and repair the lingering bad feeling from Christmas.

My will has been so focused on keeping the craft above the seasickness-inducing waves that we go faster than planned and I have to settle it gently on the water much sooner than I would have expected.

Harry, who has been drowsing in the monotonous black of the open sea, senses the change. "Are we there yet?"

"No, love, I'd just like to rest for a moment," I lie.

It's always prudent when approaching another great magical power to give them a chance to register you at the far outskirts of their territory.

The face that appears in the air is anything but happy to see us, however.

"What is the meaning of this?" the woman's disembodied head shrieks at me in Spanish.

Harry dutifully twists his Rosetta ring to the appropriate setting and his eyebrows say, "This is my surprise?"

"Hello, madam, I was hoping we could have a word." I look around. "There are no islands for miles. Are you projecting from somewhere in the water?"

"Are you a fool?" She cackles. "I am also as you, a monster of the water. Do you want us to eat each other into nothingness? My rock is far from here, but I wanted to keep you from coming any closer. Have you not yet mastered astral projection?" She snorts at my blank expression.

"She looks like your Aunt Adele," Harry whispers, staring at the woman's strong features and unforgiving eyes. "I bet she acts like her too."

She looks at him, as if startled that an inanimate object has just spoken up. "I like to play with my sacrifices as well," she says to me.

"I'm not a sacrifice, lady, I'm someone who'd rather be on dry land asleep with my boyfriend." Harry says and translates the sentiment into seven languages for my benefit.

"Did no one teach you anything about your nature?" She's looking at me wonderingly.

It must be the proximity—even miles away—to another like me, but my magic feels like it's seeping out of my control. I shake my head dumbly, ready to hear the worst truths about myself as long as it is finally the truth.

"Our kind does not love. Why do you think I'm banished to the ends of the earth? Have you shown him your True Face yet? Look here, boy." I can feel a tentacle of her magic unfurling and paralyzing Harry, rooting him to the deck while she forces him to look.

"Mírame. Mira mi Cara Verdadera."

He doesn't need the ring because she drops the other face and shows him.

"You see, you see that nothing, no one can resist me? Am I not beautiful beyond your wildest dreams? These vermin agree." The head throws itself back on an imaginary neck and she laughs and laughs. The tiny fish and the crabs are roiling in her skin, in her eye sockets, in her mouth, forming a restless carpet of invading life.

The disembodied head shoots off over the water and the only sound besides the sea and the wind is my sobbing.

Harry pulls out his wand and spends some minutes learning how to propel the craft by a combination of machine and magic.

"Can you pull yourself together for one minute and tell me if this is even the right direction?"

From where I lie crumpled on the deck I make a small adjustment and go back to shivering.

"I swear, Severus, I just want to slap you when you get like this. If you have anything in common with that bitch it's that both of you don't think you deserve anything good. How can you let yourself get drawn into this tail-chasing? She just loony, that's all. Are you loony, too? Why would you listen to her opinion of our relationship more than you would listen to mine? Because she's like you? If you'd let me have some kind of say in this venture, I would have told you that no one remotely like you could have anything useful to say about relationships." He's angry. His jaw is set and he steers us toward the continent.

I look up at him with a strange hope. "I wouldn't mind," I say softly.

He cuts the motor. "Wouldn't mind what?" he snaps. He backhands me once. "Is that what you need?" he asks with disdain. "You're absolutely pathetic. I should have left you with that hag. It's easier for you to think about how you don't deserve me than to actually be with me like a normal person. You are a coward through and through. Severus Snape, you make me sick."

"I know. That's the point," I say from the noxious puddle I form on the deck.

Luckily, Harry's magic is strong enough that he can land the boat, return the keys to the rental representative who accepts Harry's "mal de mer" explanation of why I am shaking and pale, and propel me via Imperius to our hotel room. Where I spend the remaining six days of our holiday in a delirium.

It must have been worse for Harry. Not speaking the language, not knowing which of my many potions from the sample bag are toxic and which are helpful. Not being able to contact Albus.

Fortunately, when he threw the divination stones they said not to seek out a muggle doctor, so he merely forced water down my throat at regular intervals and kept my fever down with ice baths.

Later Harry showed me the readings he did during those six days, but none of his explanations of his growing sense about divination have ever made any sense to me. What I can see are the places in his notes where he asks, "Is this a physical illness?" "No." "Is there anything I can do?" "No." "How many days will this last?" "Six." "What is he going through right now?" Every stone turned up black.

At the evening of the sixth day I see myself from ten feet away and think it is a Bragbeak Buzzard plucked bare and being fed by a human. But it's Harry, forcing a bit of water down my open beak—throat.

"Par la Rose-Croix, let me not get stuck at ten feet away!" I implore. This is what I get for squashing Virgil—no Mantis Moth will ever lead me back again.

Harry lights a cigarette and drinks a bit of wine. Incredibly, he's studying the French book he brought with the dictionary by his side. Where he gets his marvelous ability to get through things I'll never understand. Here he is, on his hard-earned vacation, nursing a decrepit, toxic man when he could be with anyone he wanted, anywhere he wanted. And he looks as solid as if he were a piece of furniture that came with the hotel.

The sob comes out of my throat and startles both of us.

"You're back, Severus, oh god, oh god." He's hugging me and then shaking me. "What the hell?"

"It wasn't hell, I don't think. It was still, too still for hell. I'm very hungry. Do you think we could have something to eat?"

Harry stands there supervising my shower so I don't try to drown myself, and then scrutinizes my every movement while I wolf down an enormous meal.

"Is it all out of your system then?"

"I think so."

"You realize I'll never go anywhere in the name of a surprise again, don't you?"

"Fair enough."

"Do you need professional help?"

The laugh quickly gets away from me and Harry's face screws up until it's over.

"Unless you convince me otherwise very quickly your only choice is which asylum you want to end up in. I'm going to tell Albus you've gone round the bend at last."

"Such a momentous occasion merits a party," I giggle and realize one shouldn't confuse things with humor when one's sanity is on the line. Regretfully I look over my shoulder at the ease of madness and focus on the present. "I'm all right. Tomorrow I am going to go back to my frenetic schedule of trying to find a cure for you and a future for the both of us. It will be fine, or at least, I don't mind right now how it turns out."

"Perhaps that's the problem, Severus. You're pushing yourself too hard. A healthy me is absolutely no good without a healthy you."

One of the most important aspects of sanity is the little white lie. "You're right," I agree, while the Future Severus is planning to shout his real feelings into the sea at my coastal hermitage.

But as always, Harry is right, and I resolve to stop traveling and start observing at hospitals when I'm not writing research proposals.

At this moment, however he is dependent upon me to apparate across the world and back to Europe.

"Let's just take an airplane. I've never been on one." His voice has a false casualness about it. Really he's picturing us splinched somewhere across the Sahara.

"I'm fine." Then I apparate to Europe and back. "The weather is nice in Rome."

Harry is much angrier upon my return. "Merlin's beard, Severus, don't just leave me without telling me what you're doing!"

"Granted, that was inconsiderate, but really I am fine."

We shrink our packages quickly, neither of us bearing fond memories of Chile, and head to our planned last day of holiday in Rome.

When we wake up the next morning in the Italian hotel, intending to seek out a wise witch rumored to live in the countryside, Harry rolls over and pokes me. "What do you want to do today?"

"Want? It's not a matter of want. We need to seek out this old crone who's expecting us."

"That's not what I asked."

The novel question hangs in the air above the bed. Since when is my life governed by what I want to do?

Harry patiently waits for me to get on board with his question. "I don't know. I'd like to do nothing, to tell the truth."

"What kind of nothing?" His left eyebrow offers one possibility.

"I'd like to sit in a park and feed the birds. Listen to the music in people talking about ordinary things. Maybe take in a play or a concert this evening."

"You like music?" Harry is diverted from his line of questioning.

"Of course I like music, Mr. Potter, I'm not made of stone," my professorial voice barks and I smile.

I must be off probation because my humor is accepted. "Well, I'd like to go to a museum. We can do all that in one day."

And we do. I join him in the museums for a little while but I'm happiest in the park with a few rolls and the birds. Harry has made me promise that I won't embarrass myself by talking to them in public, but I'm just as happy to listen and enjoy the sun, the familiar European sun. The sea is far enough away that it doesn't remind me of the other Alkahest, but close enough to feel protective. Mentally, I turn a dial on my internal Rosetta ring and just listen to the sounds of people speaking Italian as if I didn't understand a word.

"Anything good?" Harry gestures towards the birds eating the last of the crumbs.

"They say something ruffles their feathers coming from North Korea. It's a literal translation. Any good sketching?"

"A few interesting ideas." He slings his bag with the sketchpad over his shoulder and stands up. "Did you find something to do tonight?"

"Yes." We walk towards the crowds of muggles and enjoy being two among the many for just today.

"You're not allowed to surprise me," is Harry's reminder, but he eventually gives in and lets himself be led to a performance of Italian chamber music. I thoroughly enjoy myself but know that Harry spent the entire time watching me with this unexpected taste of mine.

Harry lets me choose where we eat dinner and then we watch each other while pretending not to watch. To any outside observer we must look like two novice spies afraid the other is going to slip something in our food when we're not looking.

Though I loathe to admit it, I think my brief illness righted something between us. It seems that I can't do anything the proper way, so I must actually leave my senses in order for I or anyone else to recognize that I need help. Up to this point, Harry had taken for granted that he could count on my care, even if my affliction takes away any good that I do him sooner or later.

As his eyes study the movement of my fork to my mouth and back to my plate, I sense that he is now very aware that I can leave him—involuntarily even—and his brusque manner about my attack of melancholia can't hide how frightening this is.

In the bar we end up in, however, nobody knows more than we do, and it is a light feeling, this shared ignorance. We watch people toasting some sports victory or other and Harry methodically drinks himself into his own version of my post-catatonic calm. I'm off duty from my usual nagging responsibilities, so I say nothing.

"You could leave right now," Harry says as soon as he's numb.

"So could you."

"On the count of three, we go our separate ways. One, two."

A table at the other end starts cheering at something on the television.

We watch these muggles, mostly men, doing things that will never matter to us through an indifference that seems like a miracle at this moment, rather than an exile as being a wizard often is.

"Do you think they know what they're doing? Maybe it would be better with one of them," Harry asks.

"You could try talking to someone, making the first step."

He makes to get up and sits down heavily. "That sounds like an awful lot of trouble."

"I've always thought so." Some of the men in sports jerseys start an improvised dance.

"Severus? Severus what is it?" Harry is shaking my arm. "Don't go crazy on me again, what is it?"

At first I stare at him without understanding, and then grasp that he's objecting to my smile, for which he can find no context. "When Albus was telling me to find a 'nice muggle chap' this was the sort of place I imagined myself doomed to haunt, the version of this place that exists all over the world."

"So? You're happy you're in the sort of hell you imagined for yourself?"

"So I thought I only had the choice between men whose touch was like cotton-wool, or being alone."

I take my little finger and touch the back of Harry's hand.

We watch the sordid surroundings through the brief flame from our skin, and for a moment, everything is gold.

"Hurrah!" the bar denizens cheer and we lift our glasses to toast something that means nothing to us at all.


	43. Chapter 43

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 43: Radical

Previous

Suddenly, we are in school.

Don't ask me how the old man schemed our way into Paris Diderot University, but even if he did it to rid himself of a debt to the couple that is a burden to his conscience, Dumbledore did Harry and me a great service.

It was my first choice because it combined everything I was looking for —research in science and medicine, with the practically unique focus on imaging advanced scientific concepts that would be instrumental in the furthering of my work. I'll teach a few classes and thus do some semblance of the work I have done in another setting. My research is being funded by an anonymous grantmaker that is, in reality, drawing from some of the hidden funds Harry and I have set up in each of our names. If there's one thing many years of contact with the wizard underworld has taught me, it's good financial planning off the grid.

Harry has been admitted as an exchange student for a year of study because his French, while much improved, is nowhere near the university level needed to be accepted as a regular student. If he decides he likes it, we can see about getting him admitted there, or to another Paris university, as a full-fledged student. He plans to take courses in social science and art to see if he'd like to focus in one particular area of early childhood education.

It's strange, after all these years, to have another "new child on the first day of school" experience, and to have it finally go rather well. This time I am able to make use of magic to direct the other faculty members' attention away from some of the more obvious holes in my personal story and back towards themselves. Academics love talking about their research, and so for the most part I can just let them.

I've started exploring a technique I suspect Dumbledore has relied upon for years: people's words just float by me and I pay them half a mind, with some sensor in me ringing for greater attention if they touch on subjects of real interest. Except in my case, I let all the words and concepts melt into their essential colors, and watch the patterns. It's not unlike what Harry is doing with his divination, except it is easy for me to nudge the flow towards the things that interest me and away from danger spots.

In this way my new colleagues walk away with the impression that I am aloof but not conceited; ready to learn from them but focused upon my own long-standing research; sexually unavailable but any potential partner is not a subject for conversation; and that I have lived in so many places that I don't "scan" as French, English, or anything else. In short, that I am a likable enough acquaintance who poses neither threat nor promise on a personal or professional level.

Splendid. For the first time in my life, people do not dislike me on sight.

Does it have to do with my new appearance, the one that Harry assures me is drool-worthy for a good portion of the population?

More concerning than what this deference to a different wrapper around my soul says about human nature is the possibility that others might agree with him.

For my research assistant I interview several candidates, who had been selected because they seemed the best able to speak about the new technologies I needed in a way that I could understand. My only other qualification was that the person be female, but of course I couldn't advertise that. There was to be no question of jealousy in Harry's mind, but in the end I did not choose the least physically attractive woman in the lot, but rather the one I found least appealing for other reasons—a girl who is pretty enough but thinks she is far prettier. She launches her body as a weapon at any male in her vicinity, and simpered at me during the interview. She was sure her physical charms were what gave her the edge.

Her vanity revolts me. Perfect.

Marcelle was less creative than some of the other applicants, but I decided that this was a good thing—she would be less likely to ask why I was asking her to crunch data looking for certain patterns. She was cured of her curiosity on the first day.

"You wish me to find a data pattern in these five things?" she says, looking down her nose at the rare Moroccan fungus, the bone from an ordinary codfish, a piece of raw uncolored silk, blackberry juice and a small bird in a cage. "I am a statistician, sir, not a magician."

"She's not the sharpest beak," observes the little bird, and I bite my lip.

"The way this is going to work, Mademoiselle, is that I give you a set of items that I know to posses a certain pattern. You do not inquire what this pattern is or how I know that it is there. Your job is to find a way to document this arrangement using your methods. In such a way, we may begin to understand more about these patterns and ways to predict and utilize them in the real world. I will tell you as little as possible about my own background and methods, which you would not understand anyway, so that I do not influence the movement of your own scientific inquiry. Are you still along for the ride, Mademoiselle Marcelle?"

The bird, whose name is Anouk, chirps her hilarity at my assistant's expression. It's been so long since I've been around people, much less muggles, that I hadn't counted on my gift with animal speech being hard to dissemble.

Now that I am not the ogre of Hogwarts I decide to turn over a new leaf. "I need your help proving some of the axioms I have learned in my travels. There are many powerful sciences that exist in hidden places, and if I seem reluctant to explain them, it's because I do not have a good explanation. If I seem brusque, forgive me. Sometimes my enthusiasm runs away with itself."

She is looking at me with wide eyes and I fear that my first attempt to be a nice human hasn't gone well, but she bends her head to her keyboard and starts doing something, so I take that as a good sign.

This goes on for weeks—me bringing in a sample set that shares natural qualities I think of in terms of color, activity, and warmth and Marcelle gamely adds them to her database that tells her very little. My clumsy nod to the "macrocosm" the Vietnamese sage told me about is to have her analyze weather patterns. It's embarrassingly primitive compared to the understanding almost every shaman or healer I've met seems to be working with, but it's a place to start.

Harry, meanwhile, is listening to his lectures with the Rosetta ring but his embarrassment when he is called on to speak is great enough that he is still motivated to practice with me every night no matter where we are.

We have separate residences because it was a requirement of receiving Dumbledore's assistance, and I also thought it would be most normalizing for Harry to live in a block of student apartments, though I put my foot down about a roommate.

The first thing Harry does is seek out the campus gay rights group, which is signified by some long acronym in French that is different from the one I never could remember in English. Apparently this was his only circle of muggle friends in London and he has hopes that it will be as easy to form a bond with the French equivalent.

"We're going to a social tomorrow!" Harry exclaims our first week at school.

The rictus at the corner of my mouth expresses my enthusiasm.

"Harry, you know how much I hate people, and it's doubly exhausting because I have to play a role."

"You think I don't know that you and Albus are always nattering about how I'm an extrovert but I don't have enough friends," he maneuvers shrewdly. "This is how I'm going to make friends. Wear that jacket that I like."

Dressed as instructed, I assume the pleasantly vague expression that makes both my faces hurt and allow myself to be dragged along to the staff-and-student "alternative sexuality" wine and cheese discussion hour.

Harry has put his Rosetta Ring in his pocket just in case, but he's determined to try and do without it if he can. We put our bottle of wine on the table with the other contributions.

"Hello, I am Julian Moreau, research grantee in, well, the sciences, in a word, and this is my partner, Harry Evans." Buried within that network of falsehoods there lies a truth I am quite proud of, so my smile is genuine.

"Bonjour," Harry says, "Please don't make fun of my French, but I understand much better than you would think from my accent," he says in a burst of correct French. I squeeze his hand briefly.

"You are a graduate student?" one of the faculty members, whose name sticker says "Sophie, lecturer, Marxist-feminist," asks while we wait for our nametags to be written out by the student keeping track of the guests.

Harry blushes—he's self-conscious about his education, or lack thereof. "No, I never finished my degree in England, so I'm an undergraduate. It's been hard to decide what to focus on. Here I'm doing the arts."

"Harry is extremely talented," I say proudly, handing him a glass of wine and a plate.

"I don't doubt," the Marxist-feminist says.

Then several students, two male, one female, and one I'm not sure about, come up to us and address Harry. "You're from England? Then you love to drink. Have you been to any of the gay bars in Paris?"

A tiny scowl appears on my forehead before it is wiped away. "S-Julian isn't very into drinking, so no, not yet," Harry says.

"Oh, you must come," says one of the boys, and Harry is quickly absorbed into the student group. Leaving me to fend for myself with these people with whom I have nothing to talk about. My smile becomes several degrees less genuine.

"I am Raul and this is my partner, Georges," says a man of about my actual age with thinning salt and pepper hair. Both he and his companion have nametags that say "lecturer, anthropology," though they each have a different specialization that means nothing at all to me. "You are an expatriate also?" he asks with his Spanish accent.

And I have no choice but to repeat the already tiresome story about how I've lived in so many places that I identify with none. Then I try to avoid being that boor who talks too much about his research. My studies are the only thing on my mind, however, and a distinctly more enjoyable prospect than trading insincerities with the other guests who just happen to do something in their bedroom that might, in some meaninglessly elementary way, be somewhat similar to what Harry and I do.

My eyes are wandering towards where Harry seems to be having a good time, and this wipes away most of my annoyance.

"So, your partner, he's—how long have you been together?" Raul inquires.

"Two years," is our agreed-upon amount of time.

"Well, if you don't mind my asking, did you have trouble with his parents? In Spain such a thing would be very difficult," Raul smiles his way into the gauche question.

"Ah, no, you remember I was dating someone ten years older than me when I was his age," says Georges.

"Harry is an orphan."

The "Ah!" that comes from my left could mean anything, including "That explains it."

"I also lost my family at a young age, so we have that in common," my voice is carefully controlled.

And then the knot of faculty members discusses the biggest age differences in their relationships and whether or not it is problematic. My magic shoots over everyone's head and taps Harry insistently. "My romantic problems have been the subject of far too much discussion in my life and I don't care to continue the practice," is the sentiment I drill into Harry's shoulder.

Now the self-assured extrovert, he wanders over casually with a new glass of wine for me. "Is he boring you too much about his research? Once you get him started he won't stop," Harry warns the faculty playfully.

"I'm sure he doesn't," says one of the men under his breath.

"I'm afraid that Harry is right, I am not very prone to socializing—he has to drag me away from my books and my experiments."

A few disbelieving eyebrows are raised. "So Harry, I thought I heard you saying to someone that you were a militant in a similar group in Britain." One of the younger faculty members, approximately the age of my father's face, which is 34, tries to redirect the conversation.

Harry doesn't understand the verb "militer." "He asked about your activist group," I translate.

"Oh, yes, we worked with a network of other groups at different schools in Britain. Once we organized an online petition to the United Nations about the criminalization of homosexuality in—"

"Oh, the United Nations!" one of the faculty members, a woman of about 50, exclaims in what could either be dismissal or over-familiarity.

"Well, we did get a little media coverage," Harry says tentatively.

He might has well have lit a match in a tinderbox.

"The media!" the adults exclaim as one.

"The media?" the students exclaim inquisitively, and everyone takes their seats as if on cue.

The faculty are deferentially left the chairs and couches in the lounge, while the students proclaim their youth by their cross-legged ease on the floor.

It is interesting how the lines are demarcated between the Young and the Established Adults. In actuality, the students are a variety of ages, and at least two of the faculty are as young as I, but the former wear blue jeans (there are two miniskirts), and the latter, jackets and trousers or more formal skirts. Those few teaching assistants or those otherwise unclassifiable wear a combination of blue jeans and jackets, and are looked at askance as being caught in one of the more awkward stages between a tadpole and a frog. These ungainly proto-frogs try to adopt the same nonchalant postures on the floor as the students, and fail miserably. They shoot covetous looks towards the couches.

This hierarchy leaves the blue-jeaned Harry and the decidedly not blue-jeaned me to choose between splitting up (an exercise in discomfort that is out of the question) or bringing the enemy into one or another sector of the lounge.

After an awkward moment, I take the last seat on a couch. When Harry sits with his back leaning against it, just barely touching my leg, he might as well have sprawled across a demilitarized zone.

Both groups stare for a moment and then they launch into a discussion that has me smiting the inside of my closed fist so that I don't burst into impolite laughter.

Not that there's a scrap of humor in it. It's the most deadly dull conversation I've ever had the misfortune to stumble into. I spend most of the time calculating the volume each of their bodies would displace in an Evermort solution at 500 drams.

What has me in stitches is that poor Harry, who has been doing admirably well without his ring, is visibly more confused every second he listens to them. I hear the word "Foucault" a few times and only recognize it because this chap's name seems to be on everyone's lips. They also talk about Diderot, who I have heard of; Derrida is another name that sticks out, and a host of others, but even though I speak perfect French, that's about all I get out of it.

Harry surreptitiously pulls his ring out of his pocket and then slides the pieces back and forth, thinking he's not got it set to French. He finally looks up to my eyes and I try telegraphing him my amusement, but he feels totally lost.

We sit there and eat bread and cheese and watch what is for us a dumbshow of allegiances—at points it is women vs. men; people who love men vs. those who love women vs. those who love both both; young vs. old (Harry and I are the subject of great suspicion at that time); a kaleidoscope of political affiliations against each other, and finally the group disintegrates into a shouting match between people using or misusing the word "radical"—whether they are fighting over the right to claim it, or using it as an insult, I cannot tell.

I sense a sort of unbearable impatience bubbling up next to me. It's what made the mostly theoretical coursework at Hogwarts torture for Harry when he was a boy. What I thought was laziness for a long time was simply an inability to concentrate on the abstract when there are so many real battles going on in the world. Since I have no gift for the theoretical either, my hands are itching for my potions and I can only really enjoy the spectacle when the familiar scent of venom fills the room.

That part of the evening is actually completely amusing—who doesn't like a bit of bloodsport?

When everyone heads to the wine table to grab the last of the alcohol, Harry is looking a bit dazed. He follows me to the refreshment table, smiles when I whisper, "So very French they all are!" into his ear, sits when I pat the cushion that has opened up on the couch, and fetches a napkin when the last bit of brie proves messy.

"You have him trained well," says Gérard, a man I know from the sciences department who I had rather liked until that moment.

"Harry has only been studying French for a short time. He's doing splendidly, but finds long conversations rather tiring to follow," I reply, forcing myself to meet muggle society's standards of politeness.

"I'm sure he is splendid," Gérard smiles in a vomitous way to Harry who has returned with the napkins and a bit more bread. He switches to English, "How did you two meet?"

"I was his instructor, actually," Harry and I revive a little bit with the opportunity to share the story we cooked up so carefully.

"His instructor?" the scientist leans forward. "At a gymnasium?"

We burst out laughing at the idea of me in a gym. "No, I was advertising as a drawing instructor and S-Julian answered my advertisement."

"It would be so useful to be able to sketch my botanical samples." That's actually true, given my clumsiness with all varieties of camera equipment. It's somehow easier to lie through a face that is not my own. "Harry is an excellent instructor but I fear my clumsiness with a pencil knows no remedy."

"And poof, that was that?" Gérard makes one of those gestures that Harry and I will mock endlessly later on as a stereotypical French mannerism.

"Apparently so, something must be going well, they are in France together," interjects another faculty member a little tipsily.

"Would you tell me more about your work," I say to no one in particular, knowing that it is an irresistible gambit with academics.

"I'm on the art faculty, where I believe your Harry has a class. Julian, you must come to the radical queer artists' meeting and find out what we are working on. Your Harry may find it rather dull, as it's just a bunch of professors talking about the ways the homosexual has been suppressed in western art, things of that nature, but you're welcome to bring him," a woman says to me, clearing up my confusion about the value attributed to "radical."

"Actually, I'd have to ask Harry to translate for me at such an affair," I say drily, and my companion bites his lip.

"Julian doesn't have a creative bone in his body," Harry explains to the quizzical looks.

"I find that very hard to believe," says Gérard with a look that lingers just one second too long on Harry's eyes as if seeking confirmation for what must be put to good use in his body.

This is the one human I know better than any other, and even I can't tell what annoys Harry more: someone prying into the hard-won privacy of our sex life, or them getting the role he plays in this sector so badly wrong.

"Well it is getting late," my hand is on Harry's arm to stave off the irritation rippling off him.

"You're not coming out with us?" exclaims a group of students. "We wanted to take you to Le Toucan!"

"We'll take good care of him," one young woman appeals to me.

"We won't keep him out too late," another chimes in.

Now Harry has to squeeze my arm to quell my much more dangerous annoyance that is making the wineglasses vibrate.

"Harry does not need to ask permission to go out," a voice dangerously close to my Severus voice snaps.

"He's my boyfriend, not my keeper," Harry laughs in that way of his I'm learning is a kind of hex, "and I'm saying no this time, but please do keep me in mind for another time." And then they're all pulling out their metal gadgets and exchanging numbers and everyone's good friends again.

As soon as we find a dark corner we apparate back to my room, where I reduce an inkwell to ash out of frustration.

"What would they do if they realized our true age difference, these 'alternative sexuality' radical muggles?"

"And poof, there it was," Harry says, gesturing in a perfect imitation of the sleazy scientist.

We try to laugh, but this evening was a real failure for Harry. He's not drunk because I've given him an additive to neutralize the alcohol in the wine, but he looks spent.

"I to—" the look he shoots me communicates how dearly I will pay for completing the 'I told you so' I've been dying to hurl back at him since I realized, five minutes in, these people weren't what he'd been hoping for. "I told you before that I am cynical about everyone, and perhaps my inability to believe the best about people saves me from disappointment. I'm sorry these people weren't like your friends in England."

He rewards me by leading us to the sofa, which is covered with books and papers. He pushes the clutter aside and we curl up together for the few minutes until we have to prepare for the next day, me on his lap.

"I'd like to see the look on your friend Gérard's face if he realized how far wrong he got our relationship," Harry says. "You have me trained?"

"And poof!" I say, "He'll be chasing me instead of you."

"You can have him," Harry mumbles into my neck. "Not my type. None of them are."

"Nor mine."

We look at the Paris apartment belonging to this Julian Moreau we're getting so much mileage off of and share a grin.

"Why do they have to judge like that—they're supposed to be defending tolerance," he catches my look, "and all that rot you don't believe in but depend upon for your very life."

The harsh laugh comes out of my throat before I can help it. "No, Harry, you've got it all wrong. I don't know about you, but I'm far too stupid to know right from wrong unless someone beats it into my head, and even then it's a toss whether I'll actually do the right thing. I depend upon people judging me, but I'm unfortunately immune from most people's pronouncements. Those lot," my chin gestures towards campus, "can only hope to annoy me. You, on the other hand, you're my judge, jury and executioner. If you say I exploited you then, that I hurt you now, then my shield is open at all times to your Cruciatius."

At some point I began sitting on the other side of the couch instead of Harry's lap.

"Don't make me save you too, Severus, after everything we've been through. Do you ever stop to think how tiresome it is that I have to be sure enough for the both of us? That I have to keep reassuring you that it was all real, all us, and we're not two spinning tops that—that monster set in motion for his own enjoyment and we've just not run out bondage ideas yet?" All the muscles and ligaments of his face twist at that concept that must haunt him more than I realized. "Decide something for yourself for a change—you'll find it liberating." He reaches for his coat.

In a movement Harry is held by my immensely powerful arms. In another second he is in the bedroom by grace of the speed stolen from a thousand magics. That night our muggle lessons are postponed for a lesson in magic: how to save the Savior of Wizard-kind. On this occasion, and others henceforward, I am the author of our perdition, if that is what we share. At the very least, I vow with the movements Harry receives with a surprising joy, we will share the responsibility together.

Just before we drift off to sleep, Harry turns over. "Who's this Foucault chap, anyway?"

I shrug against his body. "Some muggle or other."

We fall asleep laughing and this becomes our new in-joke when Harry finds a subject too difficult or I get frustrated by my lack of progress. "Why you're cudgeling your brains over what some muggle they call Sarte said to another muggle once, I have no idea."

Only two hours of sleep suffice and then I sit at my desk littered with notes for my lectures and research assistants. At that moment I can say that, at least for a short while, even people who are blessed or cursed with the ability to believe in something, everything, need the occasional strenuous reassurance that belief itself is to be believed in.

The next day I pass Gérard in the science faculty and the idea last night turned out as he mistakenly pictured every night brings a smile to my lips. He mistakes it for friendliness and must be confused to find himself heading in the opposite direction from me.

These people bore me too much to give them the gift of my exasperation. Only if Harry forces me to will I spend another minute watching them make him feel shut out from the community where he'd expected a warm welcome.

Harry is on polite, friendly terms with some of the other students from the group, but if he goes out for more than a coffee with any of them the experience doesn't merit a mention.


	44. Chapter 44

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 44: The Other Side

My lover does spend an average of three nights a week in my rooms, and depending on how much he enjoys himself, the trident reveals no serious changes in his magical levels if we use the Vietnamese healer's treatment regularly.

One night a week in excess, or one climax too many, however, and his levels dip sharply, the nosebleeds and dizziness return, and he even sometimes has a hard time walking to class.

Our times in bed are somewhat tempered by the awareness that the tipping point could be just on the other side of a kiss. But the cunning look on his face when he's buzzed in to the faculty residences, where I refuse to worry about what people think about this man who looks to be about ten years younger than me and is more like twenty, strutting up to my door wearing the unmistakable smile of someone who will shortly receive satisfaction. Observers wouldn't know that sometimes we are at far corners of the room just telling each other what we would be doing if we could, but it's what we have to look forward to all the same.

It is after one of these lovemaking sessions when he has my legs wrapped around his neck and he is dozing in my lap that Harry happens to ask how the research is going.

"I'm beginning to wonder if this young woman who I thought appropriately dull for finding data patterns is not a little too dull," I muse, feeling a little strange to be mixing my buttoned-up transfigured day-self with the hopeless Incongruent that just let Harry bend me into impossible positions. "There has to be some number in there somewhere, some key that will allow me to manipulate magical properties in a way that takes into account all these hidden variables that make people's reactions to my compounds somewhat unpredictable. Perhaps only Paracelsus himself would know what to do with the numbers once we find them, but first we have to be able to accurately predict the entirety of the human system."

He's running his hands up and down my small waist that never fails to arouse him and I can sense him considering whether or not to chance another go. "Why don't you take some of my diagrams of my divination exercises and see if she has better luck with those—they're patterns, aren't they? Or better yet, find someone with a bit of an artistic temperament. This girl sounds like a dud."

I sit up so quickly he is pushed off my lap. "Ow," he says. "Don't be rude. It was just a suggestion. You can talk about my assignments with me, after all. I just wanted to—"

"You, Harry Potter, are brilliant," I exclaim, and the way his face shines uncertainly makes me kick myself for not telling him things like this every day. "Of course, all of your excellent notes from your divination activities would be a much easier place to start looking for patterns, because they are themselves already graphs. They are just the thing, mon tresor." Even though we often speak in French together now, certain endearments still have a great effect on him.

We have another go.

Which uses up our intimacy opportunities for over a week.

When he comes by for a test that proves his magical levels are disastrously low, I walk him out and back to campus, wanting to prolong the dangerous proximity a little longer because it will be days until I can touch him again. Harry looks a little not himself, and I correct him when he turns right instead of left. "You should go home to bed, mon amant," I say with a cheerfulness that goes no farther than my voice.

"I need to go by the computer lab and download some course materials," he says.

"Why don't you do that from home, so you can rest?" I suggest, thinking he's confused.

"I don't have internet at home," he says listlessly. "My computer stays in a locker so I can use it in class or the library."

"Why not? Neither of us has to worry about money…" I begin.

"I'm not allowed, all right?" He sits heavily down on a bench. My knees buckle under me and I sit beside him, sure that this isn't good. "One of the conditions of my therapy in England was that I not have internet in my home, and the new French woman I see agreed."

I knew he saw a counselor, of course, but this is a subject area where I am not welcome to tread, so I never approach it. He doesn't specify what could have happened for his mental health treatment to insist on this rather drastic measure for modern society, but all sorts of horrible possibilities come to mind. I fight the urge to apparate into this person's office and read the records to find out what it was.

"You listen to me, my love." I move his heavy head so he's looking at me. "We are not wizards for nothing. This is a great inconvenience to you, especially in your weakened state when you can't afford to make trips to campus for no reason, but I am sure we can fix it very simply." He merely nods and lets me lead him to his apartment. Once he is safely in bed, I get the information about the locker and retrieve the laptop. Sitting at his kitchen table I try something similar to what I've done with mapping a magical grid or the dream world. I let my mind enter the mind of the machine and discover its logic so that I can convince it to accept my will.

Since I can scarcely turn one of these inventions on, it takes quite some time, but by midnight I can attempt to navigate to any website that is remotely filthy and the thing simply won't oblige. Knowing where some of Harry's predilections lie, one of the existing "parental monitors' wouldn't be at all sufficient—it's concepts, not words, that I want the contraption to look for, most especially anything related to torture, which as everyone knows, can be merely anything if applied in the right spirit. If Harry has to do a paper on the Spanish Inquisition, Hermés forbid, then he will simply have to use the computer lab.

Furthermore, I move things into my own territory and suggest to the machine that if it wants to continue in one functioning piece it should not store any videos or images that might make me angry enough to kill it. And to make a check of itself regularly because I will be visiting it as well. (Some of this is just bluster, but I can feel the metallic little awareness nodding and scraping at the threats.) This artificial intelligence isn't really all that different from some of the conjured, semi-animate proxies all magical individuals are familiar with.

I rush into his bedroom, forgetting that he would be asleep, and brandish the laptop proudly. "Your old man was able to communicate with a modern gizmo!" I crow, kissing him awake. The handsome face is looking at me and I begin to think he is either too sick to appreciate the accomplishment, or perhaps he can't believe I am on speaking terms with anything remotely technological.

"That's wonderful." Harry grabs me and kisses me again. Longer, harder, with so much insistence I can feel his tongue all the way down to my groin. "You shouldn't be doing this," I protest. "You're ill."

He falls back on the pillow and nods. I tuck him in and go back to the kitchen to make tea. I freeze. I put a hand to my nose.

It's too small.

After going out in public I forgot to turn back into my regular form in his apartment. Harry doesn't wear his glasses in bed.

He was kissing my father like there was no tomorrow.

Harry and I don't see each other for ten days. He has exams and is still very weak, and thus greatly appreciates being able to work from home with his new internet connection.

Upon my threats to come check up on what has been going on with a browsing history I probably wouldn't be able to locate, he chuckles. "I don't know what you did, but my laptop now boots up with the phrase, 'Don't hurt me—I'll do whatever you ask.'"

My classes take very little preparation compared to setting up for a full-scale practicum in potions as I did as much as six times a day at Hogwarts. And my research is all about waiting for western science to catch up to what I know.

There is too much at stake for me to wait, so I decide to work on another angle that may help me strengthen Harry to meet the strain of my alien system. There are so many muggles, everywhere, people that don't give me a second look and whose gestures betray none of the instinctive revulsion I believe I see even in magical individuals who don't know I am an Alkahest. I've slowed it down to that little spark, that half-second in which their hand moves toward me, aching for union, and then away, propelled by self-preservation.

What is this spark, and why don't the muggles have it? Put another way, what is this difference between my mother and my father that I learned at a young age, accepted but have never understood? These two worlds I can step in and out of because they're not protected by a gate or a moat but are still so far apart, they push me back into the old books I'd sworn off because they enrage me too much.

There are some new muggle translations that I didn't see when Miss Bundle was guiding my research among the libraries of the world, and these begin to create new associations in my mind. After much study I find myself returning again and again to the concept of the "Mumia," which is the one force among the many mentioned by Paracelsus that he connects specifically with magic.

"_On account of the great occult power contained in the Mumia, it is used in witchcraft and sorcerers. "Witches and sorcerers may make a bargain with evil spirits, and cause them to carry the Mumia to certain places where it will come in contact with other people, without the knowledge of the latter, and cause them harm. They take earth from the graves…. The Mumia is the vehicle of which the imagination makes use for the purpose of taking some form. It is lifted up and expanded by the power of faith, and it contracts and penetrates the mind by being impressed by the will."_

_The Life of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, By Franz Hartmann_

Yet ironically, this power that makes magicians different from muggles seems to be a unifying factor as well:

"_Paracelsus maintained that mumia was not inherently evil, though it was the principal subject of the black art. He held that mumia is merely a "scientific" fact, so to speak. It could be properly used for healing. For the physician, Paracelsus said the mumia is the indispensable balsam of true healing. If it perishes, life ceases; if it is supported, life flourishes."_

_Vitalism, the History of Homeopathy, Herbalism and Flower Essences, by Matthew Wood_

Wanting to see if there is some commonality between the magic I sense and use so clearly, and the energies behind sickness, I return to one of the local hospitals and render myself invisible to observe.

But it's no use: I haven't the slightest Idea whether the child in the bed to the left of me who supposedly has a liver ailment would benefit from any of the treatments I'm familiar with, or whether I could possibly trace the path of sickness within the body of the one on the right, who has high fevers for no apparent reason.

All this skulking about in the corners of hospital rooms makes me feel very foolish, though of course no one knows I'm there. It is on one long night during which I flit from bed to bed that someone stirs in their sickbed and opens her eyes to precisely where I'm standing. Terrified, I freeze, but after a moment she begins mumbling something and closes her eyes, safe in her illness's delirium once again.

The experience shakes me, and I stand there for long minutes trying to figure out why.

She looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. This is not a new experience, but for one odd second, I felt like our roles were reversed: that she had some extra sense she was looking at me from, and I was the species of human who was too thick to vibrate to that level.

It wasn't just the trick of a still hospital ward on my sleepless brain. If I am this creature who, even more than most wizards, is completely attuned to this one sense, this "Mumia," it is only a very thin sort of genius. There are dozens of agents and energies mentioned by Paracelsus alone that I evidently have no awareness of, and then there are all the other scientific traditions worldwide.

In every other world other than the Wizarding World, I am the muggle.

This sends me apparating out into the street in front of the hospital and calling Harry.

"What is it?" he says groggily. "Severus, what's happened, you never call this late. Is it Albus? What's wrong?"

His tone changes to annoyance once he can decipher what I'm doubled over in the street, splitting my sides over.

"You're a muggle? Have you gone mad? I hear that happens to people who don't get enough sleep. Go to bed and let me do the same."

"No, you don't understand, Harry, it's all relative. From where I stand everything appears to run by the Mumia because that's what I sense best, but in other worlds where the science is keyed to different variables, I'm a mug—"

"You are the least mugglish person In the world, Severus Snape," Harry's voice bites at my ear. "You call me all the time so I can save you from some embarrassing revelation that you don't know how to get around in this world. Yesterday it was a photocopy machine. Tomorrow it will be something else, so let me rest up before your next confusion that only a wizard would have."

"Harry, I'm sorry I woke you, but don't you think it's amusing, the idea that somewhere there's a mirror image of my grandmother, looking at her like she's truly dense, each attending their clandestine racial purity groups that would smite the other's out of existence?"

"And your Aunt Adele has a double that looks at her all bored and superior?" He's chuckling now, having seen Aunt Adele looking down her significant nose at him. "Let's go to this other side and tell them about each other. They'd have a fit!"

"And there's an Albus somewhere else who can outfox the Dumbledore we know? Actually they'd get on a bit too well-good thing they haven't met. Unless that's his secret for knowing everything?" I muse.

"So there's a Boy Who Lived in all these other possible universes too?" he asks, suddenly serious. Neither of us would wish that responsibility on anyone.

"No, Harry. I think only our society needed a savior precisely like you. Which is why you should get some sleep."

"Maybe there's some other Severus and Harry that have it easier than us. I wish they could give us advice."

"And maybe they have it harder and they're green with envy about how we get on."

A short discussion of some of the better aspects of our version of reality ensues.

"Sev?"

"Yes?"

"I'm glad you woke me. I like it when we can talk about all your old books in a way that makes sense to me."

"Then you're doing better than I, because it's mostly a jumble of words and meaningless concepts to me at this point."

"Where are you, anyway? Was that a lorry?"

"Oh, I was out trying to walk off my fit of the arcane giggles," I lie for some reason. "Good night, Harry."

""Night, Sev. The muggle you and the wizard you."

I don't know why I feel uncomfortable about admitting my medical voyeurism, but I keep at it a little while longer, with no results. Frustrated, I keep going to the hospital when I'm not sneaking invisibly into the medical research offices and trying to figure out how to use the machines. These are much more complex than Harry's computer, and I fear upsetting their calibration by poking around in their logic, so I observe the people who use them while invisible. I'm beginning to get the hang of it, but warding the rooms while I fumble around is a lot to manage. Then there is the lack of subjects. How can I use high-tech gadgetry to trace an organism's reaction to the most basic compounds if I have neither willing subjects nor a way to sneak them in?

It takes me this long to discover several things:

A) All hospitals make me feel queasy, whether they are muggle or magical.

B) Without Lessmore I can't ever expect to communicate with western doctors, who, like their magical equivalents, tend to be too brusque and changeable in temper for my taste

C) The bedside manner I began cultivating in my long-ago internship means nothing here, where I have not a thing to talk about with people

D) Lurking about is never going to get me over these impediments.

So I take a step I would never tell another living magical soul.

"Encore! Encore!" the volunteer director says, clapping her hands at my audition show in which I disappear and reappear a series of small rubber balls. She is delighted with my "magic" and thinks such a thing is perfectly acceptable to let loose in the wards of sick children.

If she only knew what sort of magic I am capable of she'd not have been so trusting.

But compared to a magical hospital, where I don't like to spend much time for fear of weakening the sick even further, my standing over a muggle's bed making cards balance on each other in midair will do no harm.

It's worth the feeling of shame I get before these small, weak humans least able to judge me. The difference between sitting on the sidelines and watching a doctor or nurse perform a routine examination, and entering into a patient's narrow world of sickness oneself is profound.

It's not against the international code of wizarding secrecy because no one believes any of it is real, though most wizards and witches would say it goes beyond all bounds of dignity to parade around with silk handkerchiefs chasing me from one bed to the next.

I like to think the children appreciate that I don't try to make them smile and that some of the tricks are rather ghoulish (a favorite is the number with the two paper dragons that tear each other to bits) but mostly they are too busy being ill to have much attention for me. Which leaves me most of my attention, after performing the charms I could have managed as a ten year old, to try and sense their natural qualities.

Sometimes I come home bathed in sweat and have to take a tonic for the headache that comes from concentrating so hard to hear something my ears have never tried to pick up before. It turns out that doing card tricks (where the cards are all marked with potions I can "see" but which are invisible to others) is a good excuse to try and get closer to their thoughts, and many times I can "hear" their feverish minds desperately thinking "Ace of spades!" over a blurry backdrop of discomforts and fears. Picking out their names is almost always easy, and the ones who speak another language are sometimes startled to hear me echoing the Bulgarian or Farsi I've just heard them think.

All these exercises prove is that I can reach people when I put my mind to it, but they do nothing to alleviate the tumors and other manifestations of illness that I can usually locate quite clearly after only a few days of volunteering. My growing awareness of diseased blood cells and immune problems does nothing more than increase my awareness of human misery while giving me no tools to relieve it in any way other than pulling one of my store of flowers out of children's ears. I buy a bouquet before shifts, shrink them to a tiny size and make them invisible until needed.

"It's not the kind of magic you want to believe in," I want to tell the children sometimes. But they know. They know as I learned very young—partially from experience and partially as a textual citation from my grand-mère's table: that anyone who tries to tell you that the world is a rosy place is either lying or not very smart.

The next time I see Harry he is at the receptionist's desk for my university department, asking for me.

"To what do I owe this honor?" I ask, never having thought to invite him here. "Checking up on me?"

He grins. "Perhaps." His gaze sweeps around the commons section where grant recipients such as myself move around the research areas, which are mainly computer terminals, though I hope to get access to some of the biomedical technology labs soon. His eyes pick out a few men of passing interest but apparently nothing raises his concern. "Can I see where you work?"

In this strange public setting, Harry's attractiveness is hitting me like a fever. "Of course." I lead him to the area where I now have several digital artists working part time with Harry's series of divination graphs. I introduce him all around and bite back a smile at how proud he is to be introduced as just "Harry" with no attempt to reduce him to "friend" status. He preens a little at the equations that people are making of the two of us, all of them flattering.

"It's pretty amazing to see people examining my divination exercises," he says suddenly. "Do you really think they'll make anything of it?" He's leafing through some of the digitized images and asks one of the assistants several questions about graphics programs that make no sense to me at all. "Have you tried this?" Harry asks and holds several printouts between separate fingers, fanned out like the spokes in a wheel.

"Mon dieu," the girl breathes. Has anyone noticed that all my assistants are female? Hopefully Harry's visit will lay any concerns to rest. And then she launches into some diatribe that is too technical for me to follow and too fast for Harry to catch in French.

"Can you explain, please?" I try ease her flow, but she waves me off and starts doing things with some program whose purpose I can't even divine. Harry and I have a cup of coffee in the staff lounge and come back to the research area.

The assistant, whose name is Celine, has mocked up a set of pictures in a kind of slide show. They are simplifications of Harry's divination exercises, posed as cross sections of a three-dimensional form. She runs through the series at various speeds but it is unmistakable. The dark spot in each of the images, which is consistently found whenever Harry casts the stones, moves in a regular pattern as if it were a black pip in a translucent orange that is being tilted this way and that—shifting, perhaps at random, but within certain confines.

It must be his gallbladder. That's the only health problem anyone has been able to pinpoint as existing in Harry, as opposed to being inflicted upon him.

"You should not let this one go," Celine says candidly, looking Harry up and down. "In fact, you should buy him a very special bottle of wine and dinner for advancing us farther than we have gotten in weeks."

Harry's face breaks into the kind of smile that I know promises some sort of delicious perversion, and I expect a little extortion on the subject of alcohol, which I have forbidden him as it weakens his immune system.

"I know what kind of present I would like," he whispers in my ear, and I look forward to hearing about it later. He drapes an arm around me briefly and is gone.

Later that evening I buzz him in and actually do have a very special herbal liqueur that I retrieved from my store of alcohol I distilled for myself while living at the seaside. A little can't hurt, and this has a bit of Gamla fruit juice in it. Harry will be touched.

He gives a perfunctory thanks, tosses back a glass, and looks at me directly. "I want your permission to ask Julian out on a date."

I don't know which is more disturbing—that he thinks of my father's form as a separate person from me, or that he wants to court it.

"And precisely how do you propose to have this 'date' without my tagging along?" I inquire coldly, watching him slam down the precious liquor as if it were on tap at the local pub, not even commenting on the significance of the slight glow from the Gamla fruit.

"I don't know how to describe it, Sev, but you're just different when you're in that form," he begins. The alcohol has loosened his tongue enough that he doesn't spare me any of the specifics. "It's like all the pain we've been through together just isn't there. I know it's you in there, but it's a fresh start with you. You, without all the hard times. You're just this elegant, smart French guy who's hot as hell. I want to see what it's like to kiss you with that mouth. I want to see what you're like naked. Merlin, Sev, I want you so badly it's all I can do to walk civilly next to you."

"And so this 'date' would consist of you taking me—as Julian—for a pint and then mauling me in a dark alley? How romantic. We'll see if my father agrees well enough to put out."

"For the last time, it's not your father, it's you, without any associations," he says in a hard voice.

"I hadn't realized there were so many troublesome associations getting in between us." I grab the bottle from him so I can down two doses of the precious nectar of our associations before Harry drinks it all.

"It's not like it's cheating," he says stubbornly. "You're just too uptight."

I rip open my clothes to reveal all the perversions he saddles me with on a daily basis. "That is hardly the case," I say. "So you are bored and wanting to sow some wild oats? Why not find a nice muggle chap to get it on with? A young man your age, someone of your generation who likes the same things and isn't constantly worrying about an extensive and miserable past."

"Give me this, Severus," he says quietly. "I can't stop thinking about it. What effect did you think it would have on me—being around you in this different body? I love you and want to know all of you."

Severus Snape, you are a frightful pansy, I chide myself the next night as I ready myself with butterflies in my stomach for this "date" with the boy I have been romantically involved with for some time.

The only thing different from any other night when we meet out for dinner is that Harry shows up without glasses.

This makes all the difference.

_A worm may grow in a hazel-nut although the shell of the nut is whole, and there is no place where the worm could have entered. Thus an evil spirit enters into the body of a man and, produces some disease without making a hole into him._

_Life and the Doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann_

He sets the tone of the evening by leading me to a restaurant we have never been to together, a Moroccan restaurant. He doesn't exactly pull out my chair for me and hold open the door, but short of that, he is doing everything he can to woo me. He is awkward at times, just as one should be on a first date. I have to read him the menu, but other than that he is definitely in control. Harry fishes around for a good topic of conversation and we end up talking about Nice, the quality of light, photography, and what spots he might like to photograph in Paris.

It bothers me to admit it, but this little charade is beginning to show that there is a certain heaviness I'd never really noticed about my time spent with Harry, until now that it isn't there. I tell him a couple off-color anecdotes about a few establishments I know of in Paris, and he makes me promise to take him. Going to some artsy burlesque for men is something we would normally never consider, so hampered are we by our respective traumas. But there we are, making plans to do so at our first convenience.

His leg makes its way between mine under the table and I feel I will be struck dead on the spot by the sheer intensity of his gaze.

It's the sort of look that says, "Here's fair warning that I plan on shagging you within an inch of your life, so get out now while you can if you're not interested."

I follow him back to his place, quite interested indeed.

Always very much the dominant, his gestures have a new edge of discovery, of challenge, as if throwing down a gauntlet. His kiss is possessing and raw. His hands do not hesitate but his eyes make him slow down and look, discover. The chest and shoulders broader than my own. The square masculine waist. The more muscular thighs. The body hair that I had long since removed at Harry's request. My father and I never looked a thing alike, and so this is a completely strange body for Harry.

Yet I am still the same man. Years of sexual conditioning have made me passive, and there is nothing to be done about it now.

Perhaps he is disappointed when I don't behave differently, I think, as he grows a little rougher. He is still wearing most of his clothes and he is watching me watching him, waiting for what happens next.

"You want it," he says in a half-question, half-statement.

My face answers for me, and something about the way his mouth turns up at the corner makes me fear this is not the right answer.

"For someone who's never had it before you're an awful slut."

Par la Rose-Croix! What a disgusting way to have to think of my father! Is that what this little fantasy is all about?

"Tell me you haven't or you're not getting any tonight," he demands coldly, stepping back.

"No," I say and feel like a complete fool after all my unholy couplings. "Not this body."

The way he is enjoying my uncertainty and all the broad masculine planes of my body, something about that combination of submissiveness and manliness must be doing something for him. Because suddenly something is happening, but I could swear Harry's the one who is transfigured because his touch feels alien and impersonal.

I begin to think this was not about having a date with me in another form; this was about Severus Snape having a date with some other Harry. Perhaps the one that did have some undisclosed sexual experiences while I was still in the madhouse. I never pressed him about these men because he seemed to hold no good memories of them.

Things are taking their course but it is not our usual course because we are not Harry and Severus. We are two strangers who have just had one dinner and saw fit to fall into bed together.

Harry's voice begins dissecting every part of me he finds pleasing and it seems to have nothing to do with my experience, which is dredging up unpleasant memories from my youth, like when his father and Sirius whored me out to the entire school. On one level I am deeply moved, seeing him getting such enjoyment from me. And on another level I feel numb, watching my body having routine reactions to the body I used to love, that used to love me but is now working upon me with medical abstraction.

He stops. "Do that thing with your hips again or I won't move," he orders, and I move some random way, honestly I wasn't paying attention before because he looks like Voldemort. He has an expression that lets me know that other Harry has been let out of the torture chamber. This man from whom I would never have accepted a dinner invitation is twisting my head to the side painfully and then pulling my arms over my head. He's slapping at me like a beast.

Harry and I play lots of games together in bed, perhaps things no normal person could understand. But no matter what he does to me, he does it with love. We cry out each other's names as we climax. We hold each other for a long time afterwards. There is no comparison to these actions he makes now, which seem eerily by rote. It is obviously some long-nurtured fantasy being acted out. I could be a mannequin for all my part in it matters. He's given not one thought to my pleasure or comfort. It's like he's a nearly dead wand that he's using violence to try and spark.

Only now do I think to look for his magic and it, too, seems unfamiliar. It has gradually changed from being purple-pink, and is now mostly not the normal color, nor any color that I can pinpoint. And the way it moves, like counterclockwise cyclone, this is what frightens me more than his trite little S&M fantasy.

I don't want this person to be Harry, but I don't want his fragile psyche to have broken with reality, either.

My magic is perhaps never so clear to me as when I cannot use it. The room becomes a glittering carpet of magic and natural energy. I see my power—huge, bright, powerful as a sun—and this tiny sparrow that is Harry is frightening me into paralysis.

When his hands close around my neck and my vision starts to go black I finally put my hands together and fend him off with magic, shivering.

Whether this reaction is what finally pushes him over his edge or his pleasure had reached the point of no return, I'm not sure.

Harry pulls out a cigarette and a beer, two things I thought he'd given up for his health, for us, and watches me transfigure into my normal form. We look at each other for a while.

"That was the hottest thing ever," he says in a voice strangely without inflection. "When can we do it again?"

I look at him some more and then realize I'm naked. I get dressed.

"Is something the matter?" he asks without curiosity, finishing the beer and fetching another one. "Do you want a drink?"

For lack of any better response, I take the beer. It pours black down my throat.

"Come on, don't be all uptight afterwards when you enjoyed it just as much as I did. See, this is the Snape I get so frustrated with—you've always got to spoil things with your obsessing."

At this point, it doesn't even matter how his mind is trying to knit up this little loose end that is my present misery. He's so unaware of this part of him he doesn't even realize what he's just done.

Perhaps I am older, more experienced. But it doesn't take any type of education or background to know when you've just objectified your lover.

I finish the beer and sit there without knowing how to approach this. "Another one?" he asks.

"Can I have a cigarette?" comes the request that surprises both of us. Smiling, he hands me one and lights it. I want to drink this horrible night to the dregs. I want to understand why this wonderful young man wants the wrong things. My hand enacts the ritual of filling my body with blackness and he seems smug about it.

Hermès Trismégiste, if I could only ask Dumbledore. This is not my fault, old man, I'm telling him in my head, this is not anything I could have possibly done to Harry.

"You can do anything with your body, right?" Harry is asking.

"Yes, I suppose so," I say absently, blowing smoke.

"I want you to be a virgin again. There's a lot of things I want you to be," he tells me as if discussing the weather.

It doesn't take long. In short order there are lesson plans left for each of my classes. I've notified my research team of a last-minute opportunity to go to Africa and gather rare medicinal plants, and that's exactly what I do for a week.

So that I can prove that I was doing what I claim to have been doing, I travel by airplane. What should have been an interesting—if annoyingly slow—process was terrifying because I could sense my enormous magic fighting against the motor of the fragile craft.

Forcing myself to think of other things, one thought provides a dark comfort: what Harry and I have together must be love, because what he and I made last night clearly wasn't.

My dear Lessmore, I wish you were still here. We could talk about work. Just us and the work. Of all the things I have to regret with Harry, the decision to attend the same school instead of two neighboring institutions as Albus suggested is the one easiest to think about. Having Harry around means sex, it means worrying about the effects of sex, caring for his health, helping him learn new French tenses, as well as caring for his owl, who he ignores half the time and now lives with me. It means being available for help with research and acting as a sounding board for paper topics, and occasionally threatening his computer. I have to remember which form I'm supposed to be in at which time, and now I have to live in terror of what he wants to do to one of those forms, None of which I resent except the last, but this is something different than the academic life Lessmore and I had imagined for me so long ago.

The biomedical contacts I made at the beginning of the year are still just cards in my desk. I haven't taken up any of these people on their offers to tour their buildings.

My classes, at least, are going well. It turns out I should have been teaching older students all along, and now that I don't have to deal with children likely to burst into tears at a little sarcasm, the thick-skinned French university students see me as quite normal. They even seem to get a little thrill out of being sniped at wittily—for good reason, of course.

My class in rare botany has drawn some visitors from different disciplines, my Overview of Dead and Dying European Languages class is just the sort of dry exercise the French love, and thus is completely full. The one thing I regret is agreeing to teach the Antecedents of Western Science, which requires me to leave so much out. My students seem to grasp the greed, violence and delusions that were associated with the birth of two modern sciences—well, they're not aware of Wizard Science, but they seem to think that, after this difficult birth, the hazards associated with the thirst for knowledge can't touch us anymore.

Would that I could find a Morbid Bibliophile where they probably still congregate in Miss Bundle's old haunts—my students would never forget the sight of such hunger.

And of course I can't tell them about things like the possibly mummified head of the great scientist himself, perhaps still in two Jerusalem academics' possession. If he is dead, Paracelsus would die a second death if he listened to one of my lectures! Even when dumbed down for a muggle audience, there is much for my students to debate, so I can sit there most of the time after launching an incendiary topic and watch all their brains and mouths clack away at each other.

Muggles are so easy. Don't tell my father.

Or perhaps it's living in France. People here receive my little bon mots like I've given them a sharp licorice, delightful in a challenging way, as opposed to the dreadfully earnest English children who only rarely enjoyed the bitterness.

Except for the English Lilly. She is something walled-off and holy in my mind. I never think of her in relationship to her son, because then I would have to think about the fact that I am in a relationship with her son. But now, I let myself think about her. She was such a gifted healer, what would she have me do for Harry?


	45. Chapter 45

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 45: The Animate

_Animal man is the son of the animal elements out of which his soul was born, and animals are the mirrors of man.…_

_Life and the Doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann_

Upon my return a week later I am convinced Lilly would be very interested in the possible solution I bring back. Using all of my skills at charms I have concealed in my luggage a small monkey. There are also enough specimens of rare plants and insects that I have to preserve in some way to make them look like I've not violated any laws about bringing live specimens across borders. Using the muggle communication device I notify Harry of my return, and he is over in a moment to express what I expect to be his irritation.

"I brought you a present," I say to Harry from the couch as I watch him fighting off a snit about being abandoned with just a note, and sense a hint of something else that I shield myself from now that I'm prepared for it.

"It better be good," the two Harrys, as I've come to think about them, agree, sitting beside me.

"I think the school officials will probably say the same." This whole week I've been dreading my reception at the faculty. Then I pick the small monkey out of my jacket pocket and restore him to normal size, which is not very large. About the size of Hedwig, actually.

"That's disgusting," Harry says of what I think is a rather handsome monkey, who is black with a gray belly and has a singularly intelligent expression. Glad that the creature can't understand English, I suddenly realize: for Harry, all good presents are sexual in nature. He's scowling at the monkey, whose name is Ubuqaphelo.

Ubuqaphelo frowns back and looks at me as if to say, "You brought me halfway around the world for this reception?"

Then he speaks his language to me, "Don't make me stay with him. I like you much better."

"He needs you more, and we'll see each other all the time," I reassure our visitor. Harry has never seen me speak Monkey and is having a laughing fit.

"Compose yourself and be polite," I snap. "Our guest has come a very long way in my suitcase just to meet you. Ubuqaphelo, Harry, Harry, meet your new familiar."

"Familiar? No way, this isn't Hogwarts. I can't stroll into class with an animal on my shoulder. Besides, I have Hedwig."

"Hedwig would have died of boredom if I hadn't intervened," I tell him with unaccustomed frankness. "You'll find Ubuqaphelo is extremely intelligent and won't stand for neglect."

"Am I supposed to shrink him and carry him in my pocket to class? I wouldn't mind if he happens to speak French and can help me with the tenses."

The monkey is watching this interchange worriedly. Not wanting him to think he's come into an unhappy couple, I put my arm around Harry. He melts into the touch and the annoyance level in the room plummets.

"Why didn't you take me with you?" he sulks in a more subdued tone. "Why didn't you tell me where you were going?"

"I'll tell you the whole story very soon. But right now I'm cramped and exhausted from this barbaric muggle transport. I've never stood in so many lines in my life."

"You took an airplane?" Harry positions my back so he can massage some of the knots born of my terror at misdirecting the plane to a fiery demise. "I thought you've apparated all over the world."

"I have, but it seemed too much of a risk to not have proof that I was doing exactly what I said." I feel more hassled than physically pained, really, but Harry's touch never fails to do good things to my body.

Except when it doesn't.

"Please come," I call the monkey from where he's been watching from the carpet.

"Harry, Ubuqaphelo is a magical being of great and subtle power. It took me almost the entire duration of my journey just to find him because not only was I merely working from myth, but he is very skilled at hiding. He can act as a mirror to any creature he consents to form a bond with, sharing and reflecting their experiences."

"Isn't that what you do with me?" Harry is gazing at the animal with open disfavor. "Besides, I'm not the one that sees a hag in the mirror. You keep him."

I translate the middle bit for the monkey and he chatters in agreement. Our meeting was mutually terrifying, as for a moment I bonded to him without either of us wanting to, and saw my reflection: that is, Aunt Adele, sitting in the middle of the jungle, scowling at me. Apparently I shrieked and jumped several yards in the air. The monkey was not used to this immediate bonding and also shrieked, sensing I was some sort of anomaly who could overwhelm his specialized constitution.

We worked it all out and I convinced him to come back with me to help the one I love.

Before I can relate this amusing story, Harry is off the couch and reaching for his things.

At this moment I do something I've never done with him: my magic stops him in mid-stride.

"Our guest has come a great distance to do us an even greater favor, and you are acting badly," I hiss to his eyes, which are bulging in fury. "We have some very serious matters to discuss." He rolls his eyes. "About us." He has the grace to look panicked. "But they are so serious that I will not discuss them with you until you spend a few days in Ubuqaphelo's company. Now, will you stop making this seem like a terrible prospect for him while I get our distinguished visitor something to eat?"

Source

Harry's eyes transmit grudging agreement. I un-Petrify him. "We do have something to discuss," he says to my back as I retrieve an orange from the kitchen. Ubuqaphelo is delighted with this and the dish of fresh water I give him. My sullen lover watches the primate eat neatly and seems marginally less glum at getting a monkey instead of whatever cheap novelty he must have expecting. Our new friend offers him a segment of the fruit and Harry takes it carefully.

After making tea in the kitchen I return and the monkey nods at me.

"Wait, wait," Harry says. "You're going to leave me alone with him and I'll never be able to say his name. Tell him I'm going to call him 'Phil,' all right?"

The monkey receives this information and nods. Phil winds his prehensile tail around Harry's wrist—the left, not Harry's wand-hand, I notice. He moves one hand to my lover's ear, and the other to his heart.

He is gone.

"Wicked!" Harry exclaims despite himself. "I actually won't mind wearing this." He turns his wrist in various directions to admire the new leather cuff that is Phil around his wrist.

I bite back a comment that I didn't go halfway around the world at risk of my job to acquire a fashion statement for him.

"Are you going to tell me what got you in such a snit besides your Oedipal inhibitions?"

Like all students at the university, apparently, Harry has read—or rather, mis-read a few snippets from—Freud in one of his classes. The Austrian is now practically an honorary Frenchman, it seems, but I am beginning to regret this psychology class of his, which is teaching him that annoying muggle habit of assuming everything can be explained. A view I think that would have rather bored the good doctor to tears.

"What you don't seem to have learned in class is that—" My voice trails off. I was going to say that having the intellect to misappropriate terms isn't quite the same thing as having a real grasp on the psyche, but it's been a long journey and I'm too tired to argue.

Harry looks triumphant.

"Winning the battle isn't the same as winning the war," I mumble while getting to my feet.

"Aren't you staying?" Harry is surprised.

"Mon amant, I might be fired tomorrow, and would like to have a clear head while they hand me my dismissal. Besides, I have specimens to mount like you wouldn't believe."

He must see me as weary enough that he lets me go.

"At least I won't be alone," he shrugs, brandishing the cuff.

And it's true. I have the sample of all samples to show my research director tomorrow, and I'm terrified of what will happen.

It all started when, last week, a wise woman left me a message via Dream Floo.

Apparently this network I hit upon by necessity when Harry was straying into Voldemort's parlor has been known to adepts through the ages. They've kept in contact as much or as little as they liked depending on their temperament, which helps explain some of the cross-pollination of ideas that has happened during history, making similar concepts appear in far-flung regions of the globe.

Many adepts and shamans are too solitary or paranoid to be interested in such commerce, but some of the nicer ones I've met in the last year have made reference to the network as a matter of course.

I've only had a few messages. One dream was about the wise woman in Italy we never ended up visiting. Another was a rare species of flower a shaman thought I would be interested in. And then this message. I suspect that they all must have known about that other Alkahest, and perhaps more besides, but, like Miss Bundle, they all rigorously hold to some idea that people will find what they need to know when they're ready to know it.

When this medicine woman told me that the Animate Mold was probably going to be passing through her village this year, I relayed my gratitude but thought no more of it. How could I possibly get away for long enough to coincide with the unpredictable life form with my busy Paris schedule?

Then when it happened that my business with the monkey took me to nearly the same spot, this member of one of the rarest classes of beings on the earth became a perfect alibi.

Though they occasionally showed up in our underground stream at the Bittenbrook house, I didn't realize how fantastically rare and useful they were. The first time I knowingly encountered one of these life forms I was in the flush of my first intoxication with others' magic. Legend had it that the Animate Lichen lived somewhere in the upper echelons of Hogwarts' towers, but everyone knows that these roving, simple life forms don't stay within such a small area, or they'd die. More likely, the Lichen just stopped by more often than it had been sighted other places, drawn by the conditions in the castle that included Dumbledore's magic.

What makes Animate Mosses, Lichens and Molds so important to the healing professions is their very simplicity, which is actually one of the most complex phenomena on earth. Suppose there was a person who was drawn to read only those books with the letter "e" as the second letter of the fifth word on the twelfth line on the 42nd page. If you were aware of this predilection, you could see that this person was selecting books based upon a very simple, yet very specific, set of criteria. Without this knowledge, you would think the person was choosing books apparently at random.

It is the same with the Animates. They have a single-minded focus on this one manifestation of nature, which we can only see as a particular remote village in Botswana in September or October. Who knows if there's a well in this village fed by a spring that secretes a particular salt at times, or if it has to do with the animus of the people as they celebrate a festival in honor of some god, or perhaps it's just a food that they prepare only at this time. It's as though the Animates each contain their own divination reading like Harry casts, and they search for its mirror image all over the world with their eyeless but unerring sense.

What complicates matters is that the world as a whole, and each piece of it, is always changing—in and of itself and in relation to all the components around it. This means that some years Madam Lessmore's Lichen would skip a year, and other years show up twice or more. Whether that was due to changes in the Hogwarts environment or global shifts is unclear. All I can say for sure is that the "how" it works is probably completely beyond human intelligence, but it's "what" these wandering substances do.

The few that I've encountered have all been different but equally impressive medicinals. If I can say so, my gift is in discerning exactly what they are good for, which almost anyone else would have to find by trial and error. In some cases this would mean the creature had moved on before it was discovered that it was good for kidney ailments, or could help re-grow lost teeth, or cleanse lungs coated with toxins. Madam Lessmore knew her Lichen from a couple of earlier encounters at Hogwarts, and thus she knew this one was very good at healing magical wounds caused by mischievous students to themselves or others, as well as having the potential to help with recovery from influenza, both magical and muggle varieties. Strengthening one's system against invasions, in short.

Even if she hadn't known this particular Lichen, as a nurse, Lessmore was much more open to these rare and unpredictable life forms than doctors, of whom one of her more damning criticism was, "They would let an Animate Moss pass them by while they were busy trying to understand how it worked."

And that is precisely what happened with the medical personnel in Paris.

The director of my faculty is not impressed by the parade of rarities I brought back from Africa, and I didn't expect him to be. They are interesting, in that they're just on the border of what is legal, in terms of where they fall on the magical spectrum, and thus, whether I could be censured by the French Magical Authority for showing them to a muggle. I've thought many times in the last year that it's strange how animals and plants seem to fall along a spectrum of how much magic they possess, with "natural" qualties and magical ones all more or less evident to my special sense. But humans are either/or: magical or muggle, squib or wizard, nothing in between, with one half a complete cipher to me.

The head of the science faculty is just gearing up for a lecture about advance notice before taking time, when I pull out my rather unlikely pièce de résistance: a glass container with a mesh top, and a greenish-gray bit of mold.

"I will listen to any censure you have to give me, monsieur, but I simply must show you this."

He folds his arms as if to say, "this better be some special mold."

"This is the crown prince of molds," I say, and he sniffs in that way that makes me feel like a poor pseudo-Frenchman.

Resting the case on his desk, I take a sterile swab to remove a sample and replace the top. Then I remove a stainless steel lancet from its package. With a quick movement I make a very deep, long incision, as I must if it's not going to close up on its own. There's enough blood that it runs onto two handkerchiefs I thought to bring.

Dabbing the fungus on the cut, it disappears before the director's eyes.

In my unique case it might have done so without the help of the Animate Fungus, but what the rare creature does heal for me is the throbbing irritation that needles and other metal implements cause in my system. The torture that accompanied my sessions with the IV machine: gone in a stroke.

"That's not possible."

I am prepared with a whole speech about making a preliminary study of potential uses for wound care and skin diseases, when he surprises me by saying, "Do you have another one of those?" and gesturing to the lancet.

"Of course."

Though I know the mold to be of proven use on a normal human system, I hold my breath while the doctor-scientist makes an expert incision on his own hand poised above a handkerchief, and then applies the bit of mold I offer him on a wooden spatula.

Feeling it is more convincing than seeing it. The muggle doctor sits back looking at his finger, which he'd just sliced the hell out of to prove me wrong.

"You brought a live sample across international borders?" he inquires as if he has nothing else to say.

"Well you know, fungi follow their own manner of life," I say, careful to avoid anything censurable. Thinking that I should have taken an acting course before entering muggle society, I embark on my carefully prepared speech.

"A cultural anthropologist I met some time ago told me of a rumor she had heard about a mold with miraculous healing qualities that was available a certain time of year in Mozambique. Normally I don't follow up on just any rumor, but she's heard this consistently from every village in a particular remote region, though she's never coincided with its arrival. When this year she saw it for herself, she called me and I couldn't pass up the opportunity. The Fungus is only available for a short period of time, and exactly where it passes through is unpredictable."

"Passes through? You mean it's a sort of roving infestation?"

This is going to be difficult for any doctor, muggle especially.

"Did you happen to notice the placement of the fungus at the bottom of the container?"

He looks, where it's now at the top. "No, I didn't, but…are you saying it creeps around?"

"Sea creatures are known to do so. It's a similar adaptive strategy. It seeks the environment most conducive for it. This particular sample could be the offshoot of one a thousand years old. They're the stuff of legends in many indigenous healing traditions because they often have potent healing properties, although the trick is to discover what these properties are. This one, I was told, often appears in the dry forests of Mozambique in this season, and it is useful for healing wounds, although it may do more than that."

"All this accelerated cell growth, it could be—harmful," the doctor says suddenly, and I know "harmful" to be a euphemism for cancer. Am I the only scientist in the world who asks about potential sequelae before put a new substance on or in me?

"I have nothing other than folk wisdom that says otherwise. Obviously we won't know without further study, but it's an intriguing place to start, isn't it?"

He cuts another finger. And then another. I almost feel guilty, like I've given this man a sliver of knowledge that is forcing him to re-evaluate everything he knows, when all he was looking forward to was giving a dressing-down to the eccentric researcher in Sciences.

With a just-healed index finger he picks up the telephone. "Doctor Ozanne. Might I have some of your time after lunch? There's someone I'd like you to meet."

At first I am heartened that he is already thinking of the Fungus as a sentient entity, but he means me. I cancel everything else except my class that day. And the next and the next.

Feeling like an impresario at a flea circus, I show doctor after doctor the same trick. Some of them make really fearsome cuts in an effort to make this mold agree with what their intellects demand. And every time the skin seals up before our eyes.

They even take a video recording of the mold in action and slow it down to analyze frame by frame what they just experienced themselves: a rapid, perfect healing of a wound.

To my amazement, there are some members of the faculty who will simply not accept what they see, or what they experienced on their own fingers. Many bitter arguments erupt between this faction and the other scientists who have a greater or lesser interest in the creature.

More than once I catch myself scanning my environment to see if I've wandered into the theology department by mistake. These discussions about whether or not the rapid wound healings are possible take us deep into theoretical territory where I have always quickly drowned.

"It's producing mass delusion."

"Ergotism."

"Folie a deux, but for the entire science and medical faculties combined."

The ones who won't believe their senses stalk off, unwilling to "waste any more time on a parlor trick," leaving me with the still-enthused remainder of the department. They grill me about this life form I understand probably better than anyone, and yet which I know almost nothing about. Their rapid-fire questions make me nervous, as did the doctors I encountered with Madam Lessmore. I try to keep in mind her advice that medical practitioners, but especially those from the doctors' guild, tend to be brusque, and when they challenge you it's actually an invitation to present your own point of view. Lessmore always comported herself so well in these situations, and then, she wasn't hampered by the International Code of Magical Secrecy.

"Where did you get it?"

"In what circumstances have you tested it?"

"What does the culture require?"

This last is the part that I am most concerned in communicating, but it is simply beyond their understanding when I ask for a very large tank with room for it to move around, a sort of jungle gym that will give it interesting contours to slither over, and complete control over its diet.

"Diet? Toys? It's a fungus. Give me a piece of it so I can try to culture it in my laboratory."

"This Animate Fungus will surely die if you don't start thinking of it more like an animal than a collection of cells to manipulate for your purposes," I snap in a voice dangerously close to my Snape tone.

They all stop their excited plan-making. I don't think up until this moment any of them had actually taken note of me as anything other than the Fungus' keeper.

"I beg your pardon, but there is a reason why none of you have encountered this creature in all of your vast combined experience." They all relax as one at the compliment. "I will do my best not to disrupt your experiments, but please, allow me to be responsible for feeding it. At the moment, we've already taken many small samples so you could see its action at work. I propose that we let it rest and reproduce while you each plan your experiments. If we're fortunate, there should be enough of the culture to supply this university's needs and perhaps other research institutions if you wish."

Mouths drop open. A quiver goes around the room.

"If this gets out—"

"We'll have industrial spies here in no time."

"Biological warfare."

"Intellectual property."

The head scientist takes control. "You there, contact the university's legal counsel to draft a confidentiality agreement for anyone that saw the demonstrations today. You, look into getting this thing patented, why don't you? You, track down that video and confiscate all copies. And you, organize a round the clock rotation of students to keep an eye on the sample until we can make better arrangements."

They rush out of the room, all except for the graduate student who is the first mold-guard. He's busy setting up equipment to monitor the temperature and moisture in the tank, and when he's done, the man pulls a clear plastic shield around the area that effectively seals the creature off from the rest of the room in a belated effort to contain this unknown quantity.

For the first time I understand the enormity of what I've done to this harmless, generous life form. It looks so lonely over there in what must feel like a tight space. I've always had a feeling for the Animates, the few I've encountered, but suddenly I feel like it's me that's behind the protective shield, being held captive in the name of advancing scientific knowledge. If there was such a thing as an Alkahest in muggle society, they'd surely try to patent or otherwise own my equivalent.

The student removes the mask and gloves he's been wearing during this task and interrupts my morose thoughts. "How fast does it move? I'm sure it was a few inches to the left a moment ago."

That's the first sensible question I've heard. "Their velocity, like everything else, depends upon variables that no one has been able to map." I put my hand to the plastic barrier and feel the thing recognizing me. Now its movements are clearly visible as it comes to my hand. It's all discombobulated by this unusual attention, I can tell. And the antiseptic lab is not at all to its liking. I'm sorry, friend, my magic transmits through the barrier.

"It recognizes you?" the student asks.

"I'm not sure what the barrier will do to its primitive awareness, but you can try putting your hand in the tank sometime and keeping it very still. With time it may recognize you, too. I worked with a practitioner once who was on very good terms with a strain. When she happened across it, it would come to her."

He puts his hand against the plastic. Though the student isn't having the same conversation that is going on between one acutely sensitive system and another—the fact that one is a fungus and one is an Alkahest notwithstanding—he seems to have enough of his wits about him to know that he is being observed at the same time he is observing the grayish fur.

"What is your name?" I ask while I sense the mold experiencing a faint reaction as if sniffing this new variable.

"Andre N'Diaye, graduate student in biopharmacology," he says in a pronounced Senegalese accent. He pulls out his hand and we shake. The Senegalese lilt is my favorite among the Francophone African countries I've visited, and If I weren't so tired I might talk to him about my visit there.

"Julian Moreau." I replace the cover. "This may sound like a foolish question, but what exactly you do over here in biopharmacology?"

And while I spend some time listening for what the Fungus might be hungry for, I get a crash course in the activities of this department I've been wanting to visit and now won't leave me alone. Andre saves me a few embarrassing gaffes. Perhaps he has exposure to other non-Western medical practices that makes him much more understanding of how difficult it will be to keep the Fungus in captivity.

Without my asking him to, Andre inserts himself into the recruiting process for the student watchers and find other students with more common sense than the average medical personnel as part of the guard patrol keeping an eye on this precious entity's well-being.

What the doctor-scientists each do with the little ration of the mold I allow each of them as the culture grows, I have no idea. If they make strides in cancer research, I can't be bothered to hear. What I'm concerned about is not causing any pain or disrespect to the nearly mythical creature I kidnapped in the name of advancing a scientific tradition I don't even think much of myself, save the IV machines they build.

Perhaps like my grandfather before me, I can't bear the thought of causing harm to an animal, and so I have become the Fungus' keeper, ferrying it crisps and pomegranates and fine cheeses as it requires, and then feeding it before the student or faculty who happen to be there and watch me like a trained Brackenboar cub.

The process of determining its diet is exhausting and requires every bit of my sensitivity to divine that it wants this particular brand and lot of ketchup from the long rows of the muggle condiment I pass my hands over again and again until the shopkeeper was sure I was mad or had some revolting condiment fetish.


	46. Chapter 46

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 46 Education

I don't hear from Harry for over a week, and with all the hubbub about the Fungus I honestly don't give him a thought, what with having to convince the researchers to obtain a much larger tank for it so it has room to move around, and visiting it every so often to see what it's hungry for. This creature is going to be the death of me, or I of it, I'm thinking on the way to meet Harry after his art class for what may be our only dinner together this week.

So distracted am I that I don't realize I end up there rather early. He's never invited me in to a class, and I would never dare watch him while he's working, so I stand in the corridor and gaze at a ceramic mobile that is actually rather nice.

"Hello, Julian, isn't it?" the woman emerging from Harry's class greets me.

"Yes, I'm sorry I don't recall your name," I reply to the woman who invited me to the queer art show at the ill-fated "alternative sexuality" meeting earlier in the semester.

"Margot." She shakes my hand and pauses.

"You are Harry's art instructor?"

"Yes, yes I am." She looks at me uncertainly. "The class is just working independently; would you have a moment to come to my office?"

"Of course," I say, surprised.

She leads me up a staircase to a narrow room filled to the brim with art projects and books and easels. "As always, I started out my beginner students doing studies of fruit and shapes and looking at slides of notable paintings. The first test Harry did so badly on I couldn't tell if it was due to the language barrier or something else."

"Was it a written test?" I ask, beginning to get the idea.

"Yes, what is surrealism, what is impressionism, that sort of thing."

"If it has no practical import to Harry, he can't focus on it. And asking him to write about that purely abstract thing is a form of torture for him." If only I'd realized that when he was my student. Probably what woke Harry up enough to occasionally live up to his professors' expectations was the desire not to disappoint them. Then by mutual accord he would go back to whatever he was prone to think about in class, which in my class was certainly never potions. And I'm not proud to say he was yanked back into the classroom by force of insults and humiliation, justified by my rage that someone who clearly wasn't a fool on some level chose to not even try.

"Oh, I see. Well, he also looked like he wasn't even paying any attention in class. I gave him a piece of fruit to draw and it was as though he could scarcely force himself to move the pastel across the paper. So you can imagine my surprise when we went on a field trip to a museum last week and I instructed the class to make something inspired by what they saw. Several other students were interested in the cubist exhibit, but Harry is the only student to have ever turned in an assignment like this."

Margot steps over some piles of supplies and mutters, "It's like some sort of magic." Knowing that Harry couldn't possibly have found a painting master to apprentice with, I'm nevertheless very nervous when she turns around an easel that has a sort of three-dimensional paper collage on it.

"It's like Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, flawlessly rendered as a structural model, but wait," she says rather breathlessly. And she pulls a lever on one side.

The figure, which was of a male with dark blond hair, shifts by means of some ingenious mechanism, so that he descends the staircase while bit by bit the pieces of paper shuffle themselves and become—

A thinner figure with very long black hair.

"Who is this woman?" she asks, pointing to my image and then reversing the lever until it turns into my father's.

I have to call back a retort that almost makes it out of my Snape-mouth. The contours and hair would give most people that impression.

"No idea."

"I can't figure out how he did it, and I can't bear to take this apart. Harry's promised to show me, but, mon dieu," the professor is saying, but I can't keep from moving the lever back and forth a few times, watching my two figures shift into each other. Yet there is also a palpable pain, a sort of conflicted passion that knows itself to be doomed. This unhealthy obsession with this fictional Julian character really has been on his mind, I think, and then mentally smite myself for focusing on anything but the sheer ingenuity of it.

"He has no idea, does he?" she asks, inviting me to sit down on one of the rickety chairs. Her expression is like the way people used to watch me make potions when I was small. There's a little fear in it.

"No, probably not. I've tried to tell him, you see, but Harry is extremely protective of his privacy when it comes to his art. He probably won't appreciate that we've had this conversation."

"I want to do something for him!" Margot bursts out. "On the basis of this one piece alone he's one of the most talented students I've ever had, and definitely the most talented one with little to no formal art instruction. What could he possibly think is more important than doing this?" Her hand gestures weakly to the creation.

"Harry is also gifted at teaching, and children are very important to him. But I would love to see him meet more artists, the sort of people he can create with without worrying about being told what to do. Because that's just it: I can't push him in any of these directions even if I wanted to. If it doesn't come from Harry, he's not going to do it. He's very self-reliant in that way." And my voice has a touch of pride.

Her eyes meet mine and she looks away. "I owe you an apology, Julian."

"Me? You've only taken more of an interest in my partner than I could have hoped for. Why would you apologize?"

"At the social earlier in the year, I didn't see it. You and Harry together. Not many people did, as I'm sure you picked up. But now I see you care enough to let him have his own way, which is probably more than I could do in your position faced with this." Again, that weak movement of her hand to the project.

I am taken aback. No one has ever changed their mind about either me or me and Harry. Much less apologized for it. Harry's right: it does feel good.

"Madame Margot," I can tell my antiquated manners are coming into play again, but the moment warrants it. "I thank you for devoting so much attention to Harry and his gift. You can offer him opportunities and we'll see what he chooses to accept." And the bow happens before I can stop it.

"Oh, we should be getting back. I need to give homework."

"What was the task for today?" I ask her while we descend to the classroom.

"Another still life. Each student could select three pieces from the assortment of fresh and dried flowers I brought in."

She opens the door. "Please, come in."

A bit worried about how Harry will react to my presence in his class, I follow Margot into the large studio space. Each student has their three flowers or pieces of greenery set up on a stand or in a bowl.

Harry is using charcoal and pastel, and focusing so intently he doesn't notice my presence, or the couple of students who are already watching him work, his hands moving steadily and without hesitation. He's drawing Mathilde. Mathilde and Sophie, making sachets for Christmas using dried lavender and sage, each of the girls with a sprig that has been rendered expertly in their hands. The third item, the coral-colored rose that is sitting in front of Harry's station in one piece, in the drawing is seen lying on Madame Douay's worktable with a few petals strewn about. It's the color of the girls' magics combined, and this object works as a fulcrum for the whole picture, as if to say that the balance achieved by the mixture of their magics—not something that comes easily to the girls—was beginning to seep into everything.

Given that he can't actually see and feel magic the way I do, the effect is nothing short of astounding.

While I am staring with my human and magical eyes at the paper, Harry is staring at me.

"Forgive me, Madame Margot invited me to your class. I was so distracted I came half an hour early."

I realize he's studying me because I'm not upset with him as I was the last time we saw each other, when the monkey agreed to bond with him.

"What do you think? Did I make Mathilde look fierce enough?"

"That you did," my hand just brushes his arm to reaffirm our bond while I point out the details I especially like. Then the teacher gives some instructions for the next class, which Harry seems to totally ignore as he always did when I made assignments, and people are packing up their things.

I carry his portfolio and we exit into the chilly evening. "Where do you want to go eat?" he just has time to ask before I close him in my arms and give him a much more fervent kiss than I would normally in public.

"What was that for?" He asks, pleasantly red in the face.

"For being right so often," He looks mystified. "Let's have Chinese," I say, thinking it's the farthest thing from Moroccan I can think of.

"I Educated someone about Sexual Diversity," I tell him as we sit down, careful to enunciate the capitals so he'll know how much to be proud of me.

"You did? What did you say?" He hides his skepticism behind his menu.

"I did what you always tell me to do. I was being myself." Harry looks somewhat suspicious about my behavior's ability to convince anyone of anything, but then I rub my ankle again his calf and the tea comes and he lets me enjoy my little victory without asking any more about it.

He's too busy talking about his plans for new pictures. Like most people I have some reaction when faced with a painting, but completely lack the ability to follow the theory behind it. Harry speaks with energy and decisiveness, that's all I care about. This is the man I admire. Certainly he possesses great artistic talent, but his gift could be stonemasonry or bookbinding or anything at all that makes him forget his sorrows and act with his whole being towards a goal.

"Are you even listening?" He breaks off.

"Yes, love."

"What did I just say?"

"Something about some technique or other. I couldn't follow."

He looks put out and pushes his noodles around on his plate.

"Harry, what is one of the properties of the Animate Mold I brought back?"

He looks blank. "I don't know. You were running on about it the other day over the phone, but I don't get all that technical stuff. I'm just happy you have something to talk about with the faculty." A pause. "Oh."

"Carry on, then," and we take turns gushing about our fields and being the one to receive the incomprehensible facts with moony eyes of affection.

Though he's wearing the cuff, Harry doesn't mention its presence until I offer to stop by the market on the way home so he can pick up fresh fruit.

"That's all right, Sev, Phil and I, we've got it covered. I bought some flowers yesterday."

"Flowers? Do you want to poison him? His species of monkey are not a dime a dozen!"

"We've been pretty close, all right," Harry turns his wrist this way and that. "Phil let's me know what he wants me to buy, for me and for him. Like right now he's telling me I shouldn't have had that second helping, and he's going to have some carnations when we get home."

"Oh, well, I suppose humans can eat carnations as well." We exit the restaurant and I take his arm, partly out of affection, but also as a way to sense some of his magic. It doesn't feel any different, but there's something about his behavior that is different.

"If I let you Categorize me while you do it will you come back to my place and touch me all over?" is his acute observation.

"I can't, love. Hermés! I have to get back to Mick." He was wanting something salty and those muggles are going to fight me tooth and nail as they do every time I introduce a new variable.

"To who?" his voice grows hard. "Is this who you've been giving lessons in sexual diversity to?"

"They named the Animate Fungus Mick, something about a rolling stone gathering no moss, but these doctors know full well it's an Animate Mold, not a Moss."

I'm trying to think what specific salad green it is asking for this time when I notice Harry has frozen on the sidewalk.

"I have some things to do, Severus." And I can tell by the way his purple magic vanishes when he hits a shadow down the street that he's apparated back to his flat.

Our monkey friend must be doing his work. The part of me that has been clenched since Harry and Julian's night out relaxes a little.

And then I realize that perhaps the praise Margot gave me earlier was undeserved—my attitude with Harry is far from laissez-faire. I've gone so far as to strap a monkey on him so that he'll see things my way. But if those two pieces of artwork are any indication, Harry is truly making huge strides towards the healthy version of his inner strength.

When I apparate outside the building where the naturally migratory Mick is being held prisoner in a glass box, the person looking over him is Andre. I've seen him there very often, watching the fungus and observing in the background while other researchers buzz around and make plans.

A few of the plan-makers are just leaving, and I set down my grocery bag.

"What's on the menu tonight, Julian?"

"Dandelion greens and pickled ginger."

"Doesn't sound half bad. The white chocolate and anchovies last night were disgusting." He helps me place bits of the food in different parts of the tank so it will help Mick get some exercise.

"The cashier at the market often thinks the same. I suspect she believes this is some sort of bizarre, possibly drug-fueled scavenger hunt I go on in the supermarket near campus about the same time every night."

Andre laughs, a nice sort of laugh that puts me off my guard for what he says next, "How do you know what it needs to eat?"

My mouth opens and closes several times. Maybe I could have done better under normal circumstances, but I'm exhausted. "I just do," is what I settle on, and it's the essence of all the other answers I could have made up.

He considers this for a moment. "Can I learn?"

Again, the most sensible question among all the furor going on in the medical faculty over our unusual visitor. "I don't know. I do know that you can't learn from me, but if you can find a pattern in what he's been eating, by all means, tell my research assistants. They're wracking their brains trying to figure it out."

He looks surprised and then wipes the expression away. "Of course you would be assembling your own data. Perhaps I could work with your team. I and a couple of other students have been tracking its, his, movements, the temperature, and several other variables in an effort to isolate the best living conditions."

"You have?" I lean back in my chair. "That's a relief, because I've been wanting to do that but my assistants are all computer people who don't feel comfortable measuring mold, and I simply haven't had the time." We watch the Fungus inch over to inspect a bit of dandelion. "What is your experiment to be, Andre? I never thought to ask."

His voice takes on a little scorn. "How am I supposed to devise an experiment on a life form whose habits and qualities I don't even understand? I'm not going to just cut my own skin and slather on a bit of mold and call that conclusive proof of its beneficial qualities. For all we know it's toxic." He looks over at me. "I beg your pardon, Julian, I—"

I'm laughing. One of my first real laughs with a muggle. "No, no, you are absolutely right. I've traveled all over the world and worked with both traditional and Western healers, and I have to tell you, Andre, the difference is not between whether someone uses tree bark or antibiotic capsules. The two varieties of doctor I see are the one that will put something in or on himself without asking questions, and the one that will at least experiment first."

"But," he looks confused. "I've seen you cut yourself a dozen times to demonstrate the fungus' properties. You refuse to use the mandatory precautions. You even distribute the samples with your bare hands!"

Of course I do. My lifetime of tactile quarantine won't let me condemn Mick to a life without movement and contact.

"Well, I have a good bit of experience with Animate Lichens, Mosses and Fungi, both in the laboratory and in the field."

"I thought you said each strain had different properties."

Damn this muggle for being so thorough!

"It does."

He waits. Since the man is actually listening I tell him the complete story I've been keeping from the rest of the faculty so as not to either taint their research or cause hysteria.

"What I am about to tell you must not be repeated to anyone. Not just for my sake, but for a way of life that is neither of our places to jeopardize."

Andre nods solemnly.

"The way I heard about this particular Fungus was through a traditional healer in a country I will not name."

"But I've heard you say a dozen times you were in Mozambique," he objects.

"If you were to look in my passport, you would see three stamps for the last ten days: Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana. In one of these three countries, probably not Mozambique, there is a healer I met in my travels and who was as favorably impressed by me as I was by her. It's not easy to be accepted by such people." Actually, she was one of the only ones with the grace to not laugh at me to my face, but that was a notable difference.

"She was nice enough to leave word for someone to get in touch with me when the Fungus she told me about did indeed appear in her village this season. I watched her cure a variety of skin lesions with it, including a gangrenous diabetic ulcer that I would have said was beyond hope. I have made some study of skin treatments, you see, so I am not that easy to fool." Though my lifetime of experience with skin salves is limited to magical individuals, I can see the authority in my voice making Andre realize he'd underestimated me as mere explorer.

"Some of these skin ailments are chronic and will come back when the Fungus has moved on. But sufferers come from miles around to be treated, so I got to see enough cases to satisfy me. And no, I am not of the sort who tends to accept medical claims at face value. I've watched this particular woman's technique, and the most powerful testimony is the fact that she is probably in her nineties and appears to be around sixty. This is a trait I have seen in many of the most talented practitioners around the world."

Andre nods, trying to process all of this. "Have you encountered any gifted traditional healers in Senegal?" I ask.

"No. I've never been to one and probably wouldn't, but it wouldn't occur to me to argue with such a practitioner either," he says with a note of apology. Apparently Andre witnessed more of the early strenuous objections the muggle doctors made to what they were seeing than I remembered. "Perhaps my culture compartmentalizes these things or something."

"It's no matter. I expected there to be conflict with my background and that of the medical faculty here. My plans did not include the administrative nightmare that Mick has become now that so many are interested in studying him. You see how enthused everyone is. Imagine if they knew how long this substance has been tested and the types of cures it has worked. There would be hordes of scientists and maybe even journalists staking out its every move. These are the rarest and perhaps some of the oldest of life forms, and the human race will miss out if Animates get over-harvested or otherwise killed off as a fad. This traditional healer who told me would be furious if we scared off this remedy she counts on."

His brow is knit in thought. "So why doesn't your friend culture a piece of the thing and treat her patients all year round?"

I look at him surprised, "Well of course she tries. Every year. And she fails. She doesn't know what it eats."

"But you do. You know something that she, who has observed it for years, doesn't." It's a statement.

"Yes. I just know. I can't predict a day ahead, but after spending time with Mick, yes, I know what he needs to eat at that moment."

The student flips through his notes. "Some of us have been trying to ascertain if this is actually true by planting other foodstuffs or even repeats of previous days."

This amuses me. People don't usually put the Alkahest to the test. "And?"

Andre shrugs. "Your selection is what it eats every time. One hundred percent accuracy out of a nearly infinite set of comestibles alone or in combination."

"What if I'm introducing some invisible substance into its rations when I feed it?" I inquire, knowing the answer.

"Every time I'm in here with you I manage to be the person who puts the food in the tank." He grins. "As you seem to have noticed."

"And your conclusion from theses admittedly preliminary observations is?"

He answers with a question: "Can you teach me?"

And for the first time in a long time, I really wish I could share this small part of my condition. With this muggle, of all people.

"My specific skills, perhaps not, but has your data revealed any differences in the way Mick reacts to your presence?"

The researcher flips through his papers and I think how much Lessmore would like him. "Generally speaking, one could say we get on rather well. He's more Animated, no pun intended, when I and a few others are here. He's more likely to eat and move around. He doesn't care for crowds."

This smudge of gray fuzz in a tank and I are so much alike. Andre and I watch him slowly engulf a piece of ginger. Some of his older meals have fragments that have been left according to my instruction around the tank to see if spores will take hold. A few have been removed and placed in other environments to see if they'll grow in the new setting. So far, only the sample I have direct control over has lived longer than a few days.

"Julian?"

"Yes?"

"If you'll pardon my intrusion, do you sleep?"

I run my hand across my face. Do I look noticeably sleep-deprived? I have no way of knowing, and when I don't see Harry very often I run the risk of walking around with traces of soap on my face.

"Perhaps not as often as I should," I laugh ruefully.

"Go to sleep. Mick will be here tomorrow, hopefully, and I will contact your research team about the data. Couldn't you just have someone pick up the food for the day?"

If only I could spare myself the tiring process of Categorizing half a supermarket, or worse, wandering around a park, looking for the substances that match the Spagyrics I can sense but am helpless to explain. "Alas, no, but perhaps there is some pattern I'm missing. My training only goes so far, which is why I came to study at this university. I need people to help me take my intuition a step further and figure out the unifying theories." All this comes out in a rush, leaving me breathless with the urgency I take care to hide from my colleagues.

"Sounds like it will take a lifetime. Go to sleep," Andre says and settles back in his chair with his clipboard. "And Julian?"

"Yes?" I say from the door.

"Did you go to three countries just to make it harder to determine exactly where you found the sample?"

"Yes, yes I did," I answer.

Only when he's slapping his knee and saying, "paranoid, man, you're paranoid," do I realize my secrecy must seem excessive, and that having someone recognize this sort of ridiculousness I'm prone to is actually kind of homey.

It may not be Hogwarts, but I might be making a friend. This is the sort of conversation I'd hoped for at a science department, but so far only Andre is the only person I've felt any sort of affinity with.

When I apparate back my apartment, I find myself in the quandary I've been in since returning from Africa, and it's no laughing matter.

The medicine woman—who gave her name as Nnunu but I suspect she has a secret name that was deliberately withheld—was, as I said, very kind. The fact that I could produce a viable culture of equal size as the Fungus that appeared in her village within three days' time did a lot to get on her good side. This was the real purpose of her inviting me to come visit and showed her to be smarter than many of the shamans I met, who didn't think to use my strangeness to their advantage.

It took us another two days for us to conclude that my achievement of the impossible had everything to do with my unique system and skills, and, thus, was forever out of her reach.

Even so, Nnunu was the one who helped me get on the right trail to find the monkey in Mozambique. Without her help I'd have had to return to Paris without the real reason for my visit.

But bringing this primeval entity from it's usual unfathomable course into the modern world to be poked and prodded—it's not what I'd want for Mick myself, and I'm only a monster messing about in the world of healing organisms, compared to Nnunu.

How a new culture of the mold relates to its originator, if at all—this no one has ever had to consider before. What if the whole thing, including all of its new cultures, are somehow part of one overarching entity that slithers around the world like a dinosaur that never went extinct? If I do anything to disrespect her practice or disturb this example of the species or potentially the species itself, I do know Nnunu will kill me by dream floo attack or whatever these shamans are capable of. Every one of them made it known that if I crossed them there's no place on earth I could hide from their wrath.

Though every day Mick grows a healthy amount, enough to keep the faculty supplied with samples, I'm struck with this belated fear over the intersection between worlds I've sponsored. All in the name of an alibi for finding Harry's monkey.

So no, I'm not sleeping very much at all. When I do I have nightmares about the healers of the world setting upon me in the dream world. Even Dreamless Sleep seems like a bad idea because they could full well be better than I am at navigating this plane without needing to be asleep.


	47. Chapter 47

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 47: A Little Intrigue

Two days later Harry and I are sharing an umbrella on the way to have a coffee. Wednesdays we each have some free time and usually make it a point to put all of the other demands upon our attention aside to stop pretending to be muggles right in the middle of this bustling muggle metropolis. I had been half-expecting my companion to beg off this week, as he undoubtedly has much to think about. But he made a special point to call me and make sure we were still meeting. Still not sure how to broach the topic of how unpleasant that so-called "date" was for me, I'm half-hoping he isn't ready to discuss it either.

Juggling our bags, the umbrella, and Harry's portfolio is proving a bit much, and we're whispering about wizard umbrellas that don't require hands when the yellow streak is right up against my shield.

Hermès! Just because there are all these non-magical entities to keep track of doesn't mean there isn't magic about.

"You're Harry Potter, aren't you?" The yellow person says in heavily accented English.

"Yes, actually Harry Evans now. I go by my mother's name," Harry returns in the French that makes me so proud. I have to admire that his tone betrays no defensiveness. He just smiles and waits to see if this fellow will say anything grotesque about the more sensitive aspects of his history.

The yellow magical signature gradually reveals itself to be a young man about Harry's age named Tristan, who seems to be one of the goodly percentage of Parisians of North African extraction. While I adjust to this new color after being used to seeing the world through the purple-pink of Harry's magic, the two are exchanging niceties about how muggle Paris and muggle London compare.

"You've only been studying French a year? Amazing,"

"Well, it helps to have a tutor," Harry says to include me in the conversation, or perhaps to point out to me that it's rude to be so obviously Categorizing the stranger.

"The best place to learn it is in bed, yes?" The young man treats us to a dazzling grin that he wields with the assurance that it can excuse any reaction we may have to his remark. My barely hidden grimace does nothing to him at all.

"Have you been to Gregor's yet?"

"We haven't met many wizards since coming to Paris, much less visited their homes. Julian and I don't have time to get out much. He's a researcher in Sciences," Harry's hand is on my arm in a natural gesture that stops my comment that we don't care to go to whatever type of shared perversion this Gregor gets up to.

"Gregor's is a wizard club right in the middle of the city. It's nice to go in and be yourself for a few moments," and we can't tell if he's inviting us to be our wizard selves or our gay wizard selves. "Do you keep an owl?"

"Why yes, I do," Harry is surprised by how strange that once-routine question sounds.

"Wonderful. We do stand on ceremony. Take my number just in case."

And while they do the requisite exchange I go as close to his mind as I dare, trying to figure out if this handsome young man has any idea who I really am.

"We've made a friend!" Harry exclaims and I force myself to put aside my darker imaginings for his sake. "Doesn't it sound grand to be able to stop pretending for a few minutes over a pint?"

"My pretense must be guarded at all costs among other wizards," I remind him at the same time I propel us towards the café with all of our gear. "They are much more likely to catch me in a lie, and wizards are naturally suspicious—"

"Don't I know it?" Harry reproaches me for spoiling his optimism while we enter the warm, dry interior of the muggle establishment. It's the sort of blankness I've come to appreciate\ my lover is anxious to give it all up for a "pint" with someone from the world we have at great pains left behind.

And I am relieved when Harry spends the rest of the time asking for the first time about what I know of the French Magical Authority, and what sort of bar games they might have, and whether any students from France's three magical colleges are likely to be there. Up until now he's been content to forget that any magical society might exist nearby.

Seeing this enthusiastic Harry show himself is worth whatever tense moments are sure to be in store for me with these unknown witches and wizards. I don't even remember to ask if he wanted to talk about the revelations sponsored by the monkey.

When we leave the café it is no longer raining. "Come here, I have to get to class, but I want to show you something," Harry pulls me down a street and stops at a storefront. "Isn't that like what you do?"

We watch a woman performing Reiki as part of a demonstration. "You should find out whether there's a way for you to practice on people. You know, with things that can't hurt them."

"Mon amant, you are a genius," I say and he kisses me on the cheek before dashing off. I watch a little while longer and when the woman is finished with the patient she happens to catch my eyes through the window.

In a moment I have cooked up a story and am entering the shop.

"Would you care for a demonstration? It's 10 euros," the practitioner says. Several people are milling about looking at displays about classes and therapies offered at the Sun Institute, as it is called.

"Ah, no, I was hoping to give you a demonstration," I say, smiling my best muggle-taming smile.

"Oh? And what is your specialty?"

"Medicinal plants," always sounds so mild when potion science is anything but. The three small pots of salve I often use for testing purposes in my lab are reconstituted in my pocket and on my palm in a flash. "You are left-handed are you not?"

"Yes, I am," she says with some surprise while motioning for me to sit down opposite her at one of the small tables. "How did you know?"

I shrug. "Now, let me hold these containers close to your left hand, but don't worry, I won't put anything on you without your permission."

"All right," she says, and though someone in a holistic institute must see their fair share of quacks she is trying to keep an open mind.

Then an awareness smacks me in the face. This muggle is warm. She is warm. My antennae are confused enough to be unable to determine if she has a fever, or if perhaps this is the muggle version of magical Warmth.

"Is something the matter?" she asks, perhaps beginning to tire of the experiment.

"No, not at all." The other two salves are back in my pocket, and the little jar of warm solution has a bit of a charge to it when I place the container on the back of her hand. "You have very distinctive energy," I say and she shoots me a look as if I've said something unpardonably commonplace. "Please, take a small amount and put it on your left wrist and a bit in a line down the center of your forehead."

She dips a finger in and hesitates. "Is this going to be difficult to wash off?"

"No, no, it will disappear on contact, you'll see."

She takes the reddish gel and spreads it on her wrist. "Oh! So it does." She paints the stripe down her forehead and smiles politely. "What is this supposed to do?"

Muggles are much like wizards in that they only think to ask after I could have poisoned them ten times over.

"What do you feel?" I ask, trying not to sound too eager.

Her face shuts very suddenly.

"This has been very interesting but I must get back to my clients." There is a line forming next to her station.

"Of course, thank you for your time. Please, keep the p-lotion as a token of my appreciation."

The woman nods stiffly and I have retreated out the door and down the block before I know where I am.

So stupid to go into this situation on impulse! I should have come here several times and at least observed the way people talk to each other. This would have been a perfect place to try and apply my knowledge to muggles—right next to campus. "Hermès Trismégeste!" I exclaim out loud and several passersby turn. What a fool!

That Saturday we follow the instructions from Tristan's owl—I have to restrain myself from asking her about her owner—and meet him outside a series of shops that are closed for the evening. There is a short expanse of brick wall between two stores and Tristan flashes that grin at us. "Eleventh brick from the bottom, halfway between the door and the shopwindow," He says the charm clearly so we can imitate it and disappears from view.

"What was that?" Harry asks before I can follow, unfamiliar with the way Latin sounds through a French accent. We take a few moments to get his pronunciation right before I finally bring up the rear.

The variegated magics hit me like a hothouse full of bright butterflies.

Finally, color after all this blankness! It's all I can do to restrain my urge to taste and explore these forbidden bouquets with my hidden nose, but we are being advanced into a room full of calculating eyes, protected only by that dazzling smile of Tristan's.

Harry's magic is holding tight to mine, but his face is completely relaxed in the silence created by our entrance.

Ah, nothing like a little intrigue to get the blood boiling.

"This is Julian Moreau, and you all know Harry Potter," Tristan is saying to the group. I can practically see the hexes each brain is formulating by reflex.

Harry grins at me, obviously thinking the same thing. We are nostalgic for this.

"It's lovely to meet you all. I've been dying for a good Blackforest Bitter," and the conversation resumes as I never doubted Harry's skill would manage in short order.

"Julian, is it? Pascal, Tristan's father," a short, dark-complected stocky man not much older than my real age is saying to me with his hand outstretched.

"And I am Belda, Tristan's mother," says a woman of similar complexion but of at least a head greater in height. She has a graceful figure but I'd put my money on the mother over the father in a test of strength.

"Oh, I never shake hands, ever since I was nearly poisoned to death by a sorcerer in Thailand," I demur, pressing my palms together and bowing slightly. "He had learned to metabolize and secrete a deadly substance from his hands at will."

"Ah yes, Tristan mentioned you have traveled." He draws me into a pleasant conversation with several other adults of assorted nationalities that is made no less pleasant by the fact that he is thinking of ways to kill me should they become necessary.

These odd flashes of people's thoughts, I must re-learn how to keep them out now that I am to be in magical circles again.

It is nice to be a version of myself that is not so far from the truth. The hiding, trying to prevent anyone from touching me, avoiding Harry's traumatic history—there are many things to worry about, but my magic has been furled up and it feels good to let it stretch.

"I study magical botany," I tell the group, relatively sure I know fifty times what everyone in the room knows about the subject so that the slant on my actual field of expertise will not be noted.

"Can you make a decoction of the Tusked-tailed Worm?" a woman asks, referring to the celebrated qualities of the worm, one of which is to render a person temporarily able to pick out all liars in the vicinity.

Of course I can. It's one of the first compounds I tried out on Cousin Veronica, the one that made her slap herself when she uttered a lie, something she did gratifyingly often.

"Sadly, constructing compounds is not my area of expertise," I say modestly. Best not to let them think of Harry's other known older potionmaster consort.

"What is your area of expertise?" she pursues. A ministry official; I can tell by the way her questions fall at the end instead of rising.

"I can tell you what substances are helpful or harmful to you."

Several sets of eyes follow my calculatedly slow gesture towards the woman's hands. "You need salve on your wand-hand; you're gripping it too tight. You are using an extract of Ineffable Yew at home to deal with an infestation of Misery Mites but it's actually compromising the integrity of your house's magic and perpetuating the problem. You prefer tomatoes and peppers over cruciferous vegetables but you should consider adding more marrows and aubergines to your diet. A good blocking charm wouldn't do any harm as you tend to get distracted easily in noisy environments, and you have an untapped ability in herbology."

The room has gone silent. Perhaps I went a little too far in proving my credentials, but I was anxious that these abilities—so different from the purely sexual and Spagyrical traits everyone thinks they know about the Alkahest—set me apart as a different kind of oddity from the beginning. It's all based upon the observations about magical traits and their correspondences to certain phenomena, what could have made my fortune if I'd ever managed to sit down and write such a partial explanation as Aberthwack and Twick did.

It feels grand at the moment. Compared to trying to read muggles this is positively too easy.

The woman's eyes narrow. "Are you a Legillimens?"

"Not at all," I lie. "Harry's the one who with the gift for divination."

Harry quickly gets involved in a conversation about prophetic methods, and I sit back, glad to be out of the spotlight, and watch him forget his troubles for a little while.

Pascal draws me to the side. "When Tristan told me Harry Potter was with an older man, I wondered what sort of a man you were," he says, evidently not one to mince words. "But I see the two of you together and your bodies move in concert no matter where you are in the room. You seem like a good couple. I do not wish to ask him, but is he quite recovered from his hard time?"

"I think he is beginning to." I mean it more deeply than I would have before coming to this place and seeing him among his kind, our kind, again. "It means a lot to him to be treated so naturally for a change. He has not been anxious to meet any wizards here for good reason."

"I'd imagine so." Pascal shoots me a look full of cryptic meaning that reminds me that just because I find this man very likable doesn't mean I can let my guard down with him. What does he mean?

When Harry pulls up a stool to join the conversation about magical means to avoid paying the fare in the metro, no one bats an eye at his hand that naturally poses on my arm.

They're all too busy calculating our separate and combined powers and what they could do with us or against us. The casual conversation is chock-full of subtext, but none of it is sexual.

"We should have been born in France," Harry whispers to me.

"I've often felt the same." We survey the people, so similar yet so refreshingly different than the magical people we are familiar with, and do feel strangely relaxed in a place where everyone has one hand on their wands and the only reason they trust the barman is because he's a squib.

My partner drifts back to the group of younger folk who are having an animated conversation about what appears to be some French kind of wizard sport, and I smile politely as my companions discuss local wizard politics that I hope never to have to understand.

My gaze follows Harry, a young man interested in learning things, with so much magical ability he's just begun to tap it. Maybe he will find a job in the wizard community in France. Maybe just across the channel we can find a mirror version of the life we lost. As if everything can be different if it's lived in a different language.

Eventually someone suggests going to a muggle bar where there's live music. Harry and I have a brief conversation with our eyes across the room. "I think not, I've had a long day," and I am at Harry's side as quickly as I can while still looking casual "Are you staying out, Harry?"

"Come to my place," he suggests. "Sorry we're not up for it tonight, but I'd love to go some other time. All I do is study, and it's nice to be among friends." With an irresistible smile, the perfect couple puts their arms around each other and apparates home.

When we reappear in Harry's bedroom he is dead weight in my arms. I lower him to the bed.

"I don't understand," he says in a pleading voice, "Why do I feel like I just shagged you all night when we barely touched each other?"

The part of me that feeds off guilt gobbles up this little morsel. Nice to know that our intimacy is the measure for his ill health.

"The place was full of magic; you're not used to being around other wizards. Probably you were shielding rather forcefully without thinking about it," I reassure him, double-checking that I'm back in my natural form before laying down by his side. "It wouldn't do for that crowd to realize that your health is so fragile. There are probably steps we can take to strengthen your shield without expending so much energy. Perhaps you socializing on your own is all it will take," I say in this cheerful voice I use that even fools me sometimes.

"No, Sev, I want you to be with me," he says, wrapping his legs and arms around me weakly. "It's no fun without you."

This last is not true, as it turns out.

Suddenly, everything is Tristan. Tristan and I went broom-racing. Tristan and I went to the Louvre. He took me to his house and I met his sisters. Tristan has invited me to his artist's group. We've started a three-dimensional collage that moves like wizard photographs. He's invited me to a wizarding village to see the game they play similar to quidditch but with spears. He's—

—relieved me so much he has no idea.

When Harry asks me if I'm jealous, I wonder if I make him feel bad with how sincerely I say no. My work is not progressing the way I would like, and I'm beginning to wonder if the medical faculty is so distant because my research has been unimpressive. My classes are going extremely well, but the scorecard starts over in the laboratories. Now that my messages to Dumbledore are more frequent because I can sincerely say that Harry is making friends, I can finally begin to devote myself to my mission of saving my lover from the sure doom that is my love.

This is the longest Harry and I have been apart since we've come to Paris. We're both so busy on our various projects that I enjoy our telephone conversations more than I would have thought possible before we began this shared enterprise of trying to make our fortunes in muggle society.

Harry calls me to discuss his art projects with Tristan, which are most interesting. The Parisian is gifted with sigils, but unlike other witches and wizards good at distilling a spell into visual form, he is, like Harry, gifted artistically as well. His aim is to find ways to increase peace and well-being among magical and muggle folk alike by the use of sigils that are also aesthetically pleasing art displays in their own right. Since he is interested mainly in abstract art, this is all new to Harry, and I get to listen to him blather on about techniques I know nothing about.

He does ask me about contacts regarding magical art, and then puts Tristan on the line without warning. We talk. He is intelligent, that's for sure. The sort of friend I would have chosen for Harry if I could. Perhaps too perfect of a match.

"Do you know anyone who will sell me some Sentiment Sponge-stone? I want to see what it would be like to literally put my emotions into a piece of art."

Of course I do. I know or can know nearly any nefarious wizard in Europe, but I can't let them trace this Julian character to the Snape they've commissioned dubious potions from in the past. And the Sponge-stone has been known to cause mass hysteria when used by the inexperienced or the ill-intentioned, so it's not available anywhere other than the black market.

"Why don't you try Dominique down at the bookshop, you know, the one that specializes in the books that read to you?" This contact is several degrees removed from the real person who can find the Sponge-stone, but it will lead Tristan in the right direction.

He puts Harry back on the line and I still can't tell if they're sleeping together.

"Hold on," I hear a door closing. "Sev when can I see you?" The sexual need is clear to me in his tone.

"You know I always want you, love, but I have this Animate Mold situation I got myself into, and then classes and my after-hours research on our little problem," which is what we call the fact that I will kill him someday unless we figure out a way to stop it.

"Yeah, I know, I have a lot of stuff on too," Harry says, disappointed but resigned. This is better than the anger I would have expected.

A few moments later my telephone rings. It's an unknown number.

"Julian Moreau," I say in the bland, clipped tones this busy professor who is from everywhere and nowhere uses.

"Julian, I was wondering if you were free tonight," comes Harry's voice.

"Er, no, I have a meeting in the medical research department," I say, my inner Snape quaking. "Thank you though."

"Are you sure? I'll make it worth your while, just like I did last time," this other Harry's voice wheedles through the muggle device.

"Yes, well, that I don't doubt. It's very flattering, thank you, but I must ring off. Another call."

I stare at the device in my hand, but it tells me nothing I'd like to know:

Whether this plan of my having two identities wasn't Dumbledore's stupidest scheme ever, because it's taking its toll on both Harry and me. Neither of us paragons of mental health.

Whether Phil's talent is going to be enough to help Harry integrate this legacy of Voldemort he's carrying around, or if they've even met.

Whether the monkey's contribution is actually working quite well: to bring Harry closer to a wizard nearer his age, who is a better match for him. If that's what's giving Harry such a positive outlook and new access to his talents, neither Dumbledore nor I would stand in the way.

Whether I am capable of continuing to sleep with someone who is just one centimeter away from the legacy of the evil man who owned me and waged war using my True Face for near on twenty years.


	48. Chapter 48

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 48: The Reflection

.

Soon after, in what is my third week of volunteering I am at the hospital florist stocking up on big Gerber daisies to shrink before my act when I hear a voice I can't place.

"Are you visiting someone?"

I turn and see the woman from the Sun Institute.

Severus Snape may not blush in shame, but apparently Julian does. "Hello, madam, I'm so sorry to have intruded upon your practice the way I did—"

"Nonsense," she hands over a bill for her pink roses. "It was very amusing."

"Then I am glad," I say stiffly, not at all able to pretend that I like being the subject of sport.

She laughs—a warm, tinkling, playful sound that reminds me of Dumbledore of all things—and then breaks off.

"Is anything the matter? Oh of course, you are here visiting a sick friend or family member and I am preventing you from buying flowers."

In a daze I hand over the money. "Yes, er, no, yes, I am visiting several people who are ill, no they are not family or even friends, no you are not preventing me from doing anything at the moment. I still have several minutes before my shift." She prompts me with her eyebrows. "I am a volunteer magician in the children's wards."

Now Severus Snape is blushing along with Julian at the impression my words leave—I am not a cheap muggle illusionist! I am the Alkahest on a mission to—

"Would you like to have some coffee?" she asks over her roses, the pink petals contrasting with her warm brown skin.

"Very much," I say and follow her to the coffee kiosk and then to a covered porch overlooking a garden, in which some patients sit in wheelchairs next to attendants.

We sit on a bench. "You are here to visit someone?"

She touches the flowers for a moment. "Yes, my cousin. She has been here for two months. Soon they will probably move her to a home of some sort."

"I'm sorry."

"Rukmini was born in Europe—here in Paris. Unlike me—I was born in India and moved to England as a small child. She went back to India to live, working as a teacher with a relief organization. Mini witnessed one of the worst Naxalite bombings two years ago."

"And she has only been transferred to this Paris hospital two months ago?"

"No," she sips her coffee and looks at me directly for the first time. "Would you like to meet her?"

"Yes I would," I say, and for once, my words to a muggle are not a lie. Perhaps this relative will be the muggle I can connect with.

"My cousin witnessed the bombing two years ago and was completely fine until two months ago. She was assaulted on the street and though her injuries were not life-threatening, she's not regained consciousness. We can only think the two traumas are related somehow."

We throw away our cups and I ignore that I may be late for my shift—this feels significant.

"I'm Shanti Mehra," she whispers as she signs in to a wing that is unhealthily silent. "You are?"

"Julian Moreau."

She writes my name and shifts her flowers to extend her hand.

There's no reason not to shake it so I do. I draw my hand back too fast. Is this woman sick? She's far too warm.

She looks at me quizzically.

"I'm sorry, I'm a bit nervous about physical contact. It's one of my peculiarities."

She leads me to a room and nods familiarly with a nurse. "Rukmini, I have brought a friend."

While Shanti busies herself with changing the old flowers with the new ones—along with one of my daisies—my awareness is scouring the room for a foothold. There must be a reason why I've had this encounter.

"Mini, today is Thursday," Shanti begins "Julian is the strange man I told you about. The one with the lotion." She gives me a devilish look. "If he's selling something he's not mentioned it yet."

"I am not some mountebank peddling wares," I break in, aghast. "I would pay you for the privilege of trying to help people at your establishment."

"The Sun isn't mine," she laughs again. "And you are very serious."

My Severus glare is hastily packed away. "Yes, well, perhaps I am not accustomed to someone so—playful."

The woman switches to English suddenly, "'Shanti-ma, remember where you came from,' my mother used to say to me. In Hindi there's all sorts of ways to add things on to a name to indicate respect or closeness. In this case it was as if my mother were saying, 'Little Goddess Shanti, remember that you came from God, and act like it instead of like a devil!"

"Did you have to be reminded frequently?"

"Very frequently." Her eyes meet mine with some emphasis that I can't place.

I switch to English also. "Well, Shanti-ma it is." Thus begin our seamless shifts between English and French. I hand her one more flower solemnly. "For you."

She takes it with a playful gesture and puts the red blossom behind her ear.

"I don't want to keep the children waiting too long, but thank you for introducing me to Rukmini." She finds my small bow in her cousin's direction hilarious. At the door I turn around on impulse. "Would it be possible for me to visit her?"

Her face shuts and I feel cold.

"I won't lay a hand on her, I just want to listen. You see, I've traveled all over the world and am having a hard time translating my science to a—er—Western context. It's a type of healing that deals with a more subtle level than medical science, but no less real, I assure you. "

The word "Western" opens the doors between us like an incantation.

"Very well. She could use the company."

I bow again and we stare at each other on either side of her giggle.

"Julian."

"Yes?"

"Come by the institute some day and tell me more about this science of yours," she says with the force of someone not accustomed to being disappointed.

"Yes, Shanti-ma," I say with just a hint of humor in my eyes and my voice sounding like an obedient child's. Her laugh follows me down the hall.

That day on the children's wards there are fewer flowers to go around but for some reason the twenty-cent coins I use for pulling out of ears in their place shine like actual gold for a moment before turning into the common amalgam used for muggle currency.

"Hello, Rukmini," I say from beside her bed that night. Ever since I left her room I've felt this pull from deep inside of me to return to her bedside, so I do so after rendering myself invisible.

I spend the better part of two hours trying to detect where her mind has gone, and am forced to give up. Yet it is very difficult for me to leave this woman who is a complete stranger to me.

That night I fall asleep invisible by her side, a dangerous prospect because there are nurses in and out at regular intervals. But there is something about being with this woman that is so peaceful. In my dream, I can see the long black hair, the empty face, the skin washed out by the hideous muggle lighting. It must be the lighting that is making her complexion look strange. My eyes focus.

It is my mother in the bed.

I leap out of the chair and trip against the bed because I'm still invisible. The woman's skin is a cinnamon color. She is no relationship to me at all. I haven't killed her either. That's what must make it easier to talk to her than anyone else—the stillness reminds me of my mostly-absent mother, but there is none of the guilt.

"Rukmini, I'm lost," I say in a space that is like the one I could sometimes reach my mother's mind in.

"I don't know what I'm doing with my research, and just because people are treating me so nicely doesn't make feeling like a fraud any easier.

"Some days I want nothing other than to go back to Hogwarts, where I was so unhappy but at least people knew I was a bastard. I could wear my own skin; you don't know what it's like to feel your very skin is a lie."

My eyes travel down to her skin. I've watched the attendants rubbing in some bad-smelling lotion to prevent the deterioration of her cutis that is inevitable when one is comatose and the skin is bearing all that weight trapped against the sheet. In that respect I was lucky. After three years in a coma my skin was perfect thanks to the wizard innovations in medical care. Suspending someone in a revolving sphere in midair and letting their joints have full range of motion is much preferable to pressing against a bed.

And so on my second visit I have already broken my promise to her cousin. Using a wooden spatula rather than my hands, I use the first in a series of unguents to protect her skin from bedsores. A quick tour through the rest of the unit convinces me that it's what Shanti would want over the alternative. If it didn't give me pause to interfere with the treatment of complete strangers, I would have treated everyone else's skin as well.

For a minute or two, then, I can feel useful, but mostly I sit by the immobile muggle woman's bed and a dam breaks for an hour or so.

"Mother, I wish that I hadn't taken all of your magic—we could have had such fun and expanded the business beyond your wildest dreams. Do you remember how we used to laugh while we stirred the cauldron, and you put wreaths of dried Honeybriar blossoms on our heads and we were the Queen and Prince of the Sea?"

Rukmini lets me pour my taciturn man's longings into the forgiving silence that surrounds her bed.

"Oh! I didn't see your name signed in," Shanti says ten days after our first meeting by her cousin's bedside. I've made myself visible just in time because of what I realized was the smell of her hair. She uses something with jasmine in it, and the other smell is a trace that takes me a while to place as muggle soap, which I won't allow near me or Harry.

"I must have forgotten to sign in," I answer. She scrutinizes my face for a moment. "You look different."

A flash of fear that I reappeared in the wrong face is replaced by a smile when a hand across my nose reassures me that everything is as it should be. "I find your cousin's presence to be very—I don't know how to put it."

"Rukmini is very serious like you, so I think you would get along. Growing up she was always studying and I used to scamper around making monkey faces to see if I could distract her."

"Did it work?" I ask while taking the new bunch of flowers from her and discarding the old ones.

"Never! I think she was relieved when I came to live with them and I could be the one her parents fussed at and worried about and she could be left to study. My parents passed away in an accident when I was twelve, so I moved to France to live with my aunt and uncle and Mini.

This muggle woman tells me more about her cousin, and I file each fact away with the hope that motivates all of my actions: that, though the nursery rhymes would tell us otherwise, what is shattered can be put back together again.

_The power of a strong imagination directed upon another can kill or cure him according to the nature of the desire that impels the force, and which may be good or evil…. If the mind is weak and the soul not protected by faith and confidence, it will enter; and therefore the best remedy is a strong mind…. The reason why men have not a perfect imagination is because they are still uncertain about their power, but they might be perfectly certain if they only possessed true knowledge._

_Life and the Doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann_

On a Monday evening I am about to leave Rukmini's bedside when an alarm sounds.

Hermès Trismégiste! Is she taking a turn for the worse? The inert woman feels the same to my growing sense of physical ailments, but what do I really know?

The sound keeps coming. I think of trying to find where Shanti lives to tell her.

Just in time I realize where the sound is coming from and apparate before the footsteps come in the room.

Damn-blast this muggle contraption, I swear from the street. "Yes," says my most annoyed voice to the unknown number.

"Julian?" Comes a woman's voice. "It's Margot. From the art faculty."

"Oh, yes, how are you?" I try to soften my tone. "How was Harry's project this week?"

A silence.

"Would you like to meet me at the studio? I have tea."

"I'd love to. I'm just across campus." And very soon I'm ringing the after-hours bell at the art building, a bit sooner than any muggle could possibly have traveled from anywhere.

"So glad you could come," the woman says in a tired voice that does nothing to reassure me. She leads me in to the students' studio, where she has arranged several easels in the middle of the floor and left on only the row of tracked lighting just above this display.

Margot busies herself with the electric teapot as if to give me some privacy.

She's a kind woman.

The first few drawings are completely uninspired, not even fair renderings of the pears and spheres and other basic shapes. Then there is the Duchamp rendering of me in paper, and "The Little Witches" as Harry titled the one of Mathilde and Sophie.

The next I look at with more authority than the others. My frequent contact with the bird kingdom has granted me a great familiarity with their physiognomies. I can almost say that no two birds look alike to me. But there is Hedwig, and any muggle could see a sentient being who is fiercely protective of her keeper (Harry, again out of frame) and maybe a bit sulky because he hasn't let her out enough.

Reflexively, I grab my left arm.

I can't look at anything else because the Black Taste is filling my gullet. I turn to face a feeling I thought I had vanquished forever.

The last painting is an explosion of color. Harry's first use of paint that I've seen, it uses some muggle substance like acrylic.

It is a perfect rendition of the black-pearl Harry who used me (and Julian),

Seeing it with my physical eyes is worse than feeling it touch me and knowing it with my inner sense. Grasping someone's magic is always pure in a way because it is a distillation of who they are. But this. This is the opposite of his True Face, though anyone else would call it a self-portrait. But the human features, looked at from another angle, reveal figures roiling in copulation. Degeneration. Death.

"I don't know whether to burn it or enter it in a contest," Margot says by my elbow, and I gratefully accept the tea as a defense against this taste of the past.

I'm finally able to begin to navigate the image, realizing that one must approach it through concentric layers, like the rings on a tree.

It's like this is a great slab of a freshly felled sequoia. Something that should be alive and majestic, and instead has been reduced to this two-dimensional vivisection that is an object lesson for the troglodyte and the insane, who are the only ones that would consent to such a sacrifice.

This man's face is at once boiling with rot, and as cold as steel that is envious of that which once was alive enough to now rot.

Voldemort.

The man I allowed to enslave me.

The one to whom I sacrificed my youth and what was left of my conscience and dignity.

No, I was never his lackey or his toady, though he required many of those.

I was his muse.

The incarnation of hunger triumphing above all else

I was the perfect concubine for a madman such as this, who only feared the coldness at the center of himself.

All because when he asked me:

"Are you, or are you not, an abomination?"

Noting in me had the imagination to say no.

"You are the worst of yourself," was the strange comfort this madman offered me, and I took it. I took my place on his carpet, so much like the other conjured masterpiece of a rug I knew in my grandmother's parlor, and snapped up the scraps of magic and physical closeness he threw me. All because he located my one fatal hunger and strummed this one-note symphony of degradation over years.

This postman. This face that, after all is said and done, is completely, fatally, ordinary.

But this is Harry's face.

Harry Potter has never been ordinary a day in his life.

Aware once more that the professor is standing next to me, I hastily pack up all the trappings of my life's ruin and fling them into the trunk where they have been resting these five years. I have the strangest sensation, as if it were raining on the inside of the windowpane of my consciousness.

Ah yes. Severus Snape is a known blubberer. He's having a grand time sniveling, snug inside this brute called Julian. Julian is just a stooge, and puppets don't cry.

"Are you all right?" Margot is saying.

"This is actually progress," Julian, that great lunk, has the presence of mind to say.

"You think so? I wouldn't like to be alone in a flat with this painting."

Severus Snape, the hatchet-faced pansy, shivers.

"I can tell you that Harry is a very complex and passionate person, but since he must find his own way of doing things, this has often left him alone in ways I would have liked to reach him." Julian's insufferable measured voice is saying. "I'd rather he managed to put this to canvas than that he were still carrying it around inside."

"Ah yes, I see what you mean." Margot moves to gather up the tea paraphernalia, and I realize just how late she has stayed for my benefit.

"Why are you taking such pains with my partner?" She turns. "I do appreciate it, but I don't even know how to repay you."

Margot shrugs. "Everyone likes to see someone finding their talent, and the fact that this is bursting forth at a rather late age in Harry makes it all the more… magical." She smiles, and she's like Lessmore, nurturing a healing talent she could never quite make me believe in, suddenly here, in one of the shadows of this Paris studio. "Doesn't everyone want to believe that things will work themselves out eventually?"

This is the first time I've really allowed myself to reflect on my life in its entirety since I got out of the asylum. It's different than writing my autobiography while swaddled in melancholy. When you're trying to live, things hurt a lot more.

That night I apparate to my seaside home.

"We missed you," says a kestrel.

"Would you like a fish? You don't look well," says a gull.

"Just talk to me," I, Severus Snape, beg in the Ancient Bird Tongue.

And they tell me the news from all over the globe, all the many ways humans have of destroying each other, and my one tragedy vanishes in this huge cauldron of misery stirred by an unknown hand.

Like seeks like seeks like seeks like….

Is the Paracelsan adage bubbling in my mind as I sleep.

_Man need not, therefore, be surprised that animals have animal instincts that are so much like his own; it might be rather surprising for the animals to see that their son (animal man) resembles them so closely. Animal follow their animal instincts, and in doing so they act as nobly and stand as high in Nature as their position permits them, and they do not sink thereby below that position; it is only animal man who sinks below the brute._

_Life and the Doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann_

The birds peck me awake just in time for class, and I fear my students get a whiff of the sea from my clothes.

That night when I answer the call from Harry's number the phone is shaking in my hand.

"Yes?"

A silence.

"Harry?"

A small noise.

"Are you all right?"

Sniffling.

"Would you like to put Phil on?"

There is a shuffling and then the simian voice says:

"I'm very tired and you haven't been to visit at all. Will you come and take me away for awhile?" the monkey says.

Within thirty seconds I'm in Harry's apartment.

The space is thick with yellow magic, but only in the sitting room, which Harry uses as a studio, and less so in the kitchen.

Nevertheless, there's no rule that says that goings-on can't go on with a couch as a basis rather than a bed, my mind is telling me.

Two sets of eyes are watching me, waiting for me to do something, I don't know what, and possibly blaming me that this moment is happening.

"Are you hungry?" I ask no one in particular, and bring a couple pieces of fruit, some of the fruit juice Harry seems to be favoring over less healthy drinks, some water and a tonic I thought to put in my bag.

We drink and eat, looking at each other.

"Phil, perhaps you would like to prepare for your rest in my flat for tonight." We gather a few things and I apparate with the simian shaking in my arms.

"If I'd known it was going to be so much more difficult than one of your average bondings, I would never have brought you all this way," I say, setting up a pelican to even out some of the imbalances I can sense in him.

He relaxes very quickly in my arms under the steam. It reddens my very differently constituted skin, but I don't want to leave him yet. Once we straightened out our different reflective natures, we are actually more similar than almost anyone I've met, and I hate to have hurt him.

I tell him so, and he looks at me in that way that animals do, with their less-analytical minds that often find me to be tediously detailed. "Get to the point!" more than one animal has snapped at me. Yet they also find me unpardonably gauche at times.

"He's seen himself. Or whatever that is." We both shudder. "That's all I can do. Let me rest now, and prepare for my journey home."

I've gotten quite used to the idea of the monkey being there as a sort of insurance for Harry, and fear what this integration process of his will be like without the support of this magical creature, but I can't deny our friend has given generously of his magic. But I'll also miss him for another reason.

"Phil," I say. "have you ever had a mate?"

"A mate? Of course."

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened. Nothing unusual, at least. Our kind doesn't mate for life, but I have had several partners and we have all enjoyed our time together." He looks on me with pity. "Your species makes everything very complicated. You want to mate for life like the bird kingdom, but you need freedom like mine. I don't know what to tell you.

He puts his hands on my ear and heart, and as before, I see Aunt Adele stubbornly in the place of all the truths I so desperately need to see. He sighs. "I need to go back and bond with the hummingbirds and the aardvarks. They're so much easier."

Of course! He must bring back part of Mick! "I know someone very simple you'll enjoy bonding with. Please convey part of the Animate Fungus back to your country, which is where he should be passing through this time of year.

I gather up some more potions and apparate back to Harry's flat.

He's sitting in the same place on the couch, looking at nothing.

He drinks the potions without looking at them and doesn't even grimace at the one that always tastes bad.

I hope he isn't afflicted with the Black Taste.

"Harry," I try to rub his back. He flinches.

"Mon amant."

He turns green.

"Show me what it was like."

"What?"

Before I know what he's proposing, he's in me. In my mind.

Harry just poises there politely at the edge of my consciousness. Gently, I push him out, bringing my memory of Julian's date with Harry into my lover's own mind.

I try to soften it, but apparently he sees how different it was from our usual time together, which is what it is, damnation or salvation, but as equals.

We stare at the half-finished painting in front of us that bears the marks of two different hands, his and Tristan's, and I can't help but wonder what Phil showed him, specifically, that made him begin to see this part of himself.

"Tristan is helping me," Harry says with a quiver of hope. "He's an amazing person. No one else makes me feel so much like, I don't know, everything isn't completely fucked."

"So that's who you were with when you saw—"

"I don't want to talk about it," he says with finality.

And though I wonder many times, and my unhealthy imagination supplies many painful scenarios, I can't get him to talk about what he saw with the help of the monkey.


	49. Chapter 49

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 49: Gifts

Our monkey friend is dispatched home, and shortly after it's time to argue about where we will spend Christmas holiday.

That's not actually a fair summation of those weeks. Harry is at odds with himself in a way I've never seen. He's always so confident, and even though he admitted when he was my student that he's good at hiding doubts (as was his mother) I manage to miss this side of him much of the time.

The Harry who makes a case for going to England for at least part of the semester break does so with a new tentativeness, and then only because he thinks of Albus all alone.

"Alone? Albus Dumbledore? I'd like to see it. He'll have a train of supplicants so long it will stretch for miles. I should know—I've had to test each gift throughout the years to see if the sweetmeats are poisoned. He gets barrelsful, every year."

"All the more reason for us to go."

"One year I finally broke down and made him a Salu-Stone, keyed to his magical signature, that would sense and turn color near poison. He's been gorging himself on Indonesian candied pepperflowers ever since, and I got to avoid the whole Christmas nonsense altogether."

Harry's new, vulnerable face doesn't hide his reaction.

"At least it was nonsense when I had no one to share my miserable nature with," I amend. "We can go anywhere in the world but Britain and you want to go precisely there. Why not someplace warm?"

"I want to be someplace I belong, with you. It will be my first Christmas living my own life-even though the Douays were lovely-and with someone to share it with, and I don't want to be a tourist somewhere."

So we stay in Paris, and once it is decided Harry seems relieved. Still, we pop in Dumbledore's grate on Christmas eve and he listens to tales of our high and low points from Harry—partially in English, but the rest in the French the old man understands relatively well but butchers when he tries to speak it.

In the meantime our host and I have one of our silent conversations:

Point A: Harry looks rather well.

Point B: Harry sounds better than well.

Point C: We haven't caused an international incident yet.

Success, by the headmaster's standards in relation to me!

Dumbledore returns his full attention to the young man whose head is a fiery outline next to mine. "Your gift was most thoughtful, Harry. I do, on occasion wish to see things smaller than they actually are, and your Reverse Spyglass will be very useful in those cases." The old magician gives me a look that encompasses staff meetings, school dances and other tiresome elements of school life.

"And Severus, your Christmas potions never disappoint. This year's was especially amusing. I used it yesterday and discovered that for the space of 24 hours I was drawn to eat metallic objects and they were not only nutritious, but extremely tasty."

Harry's horrified look is accompanied by a fiery elbow to my side, but the old man and I exchange a hearty laugh.

"Severus and I have a tradition: he makes me one of his very special potions and doesn't tell me what effect I should expect. They're usually harmless—

"Usually!"

"There was one time that he gave me something that made everyone sound to my ears like they were singing opera and he didn't count on the violent passions that might come with the medium. Severus had it cleared up in no time and there was only one duel that came out of it."

Harry regards us through narrowed eyes. He's always had the sense that Albus and I share some dark humor he'd rather not know about.

"So in keeping with that tradition, here are your presents." They are levitated towards us. "Er, I hadn't thought, but perhaps opening them now might be a bad idea, as they're flammable. Harry, would you care to step into the room?"

Not as accustomed to this kind of floo-travel, Harry takes a moment to regain his form. His excitement is evident—two years ago Dumbledore got him a pair of socks that would get him out of bed no matter how reluctant he was to do so—practical if a bit sad—but the year before he got him a set of magical pigments that change color like a chameleon's skin. Harry uses them to this day.

Harry tears open the box and lifts out—

"I had no idea your French was so good," Dumbledore says by way of apology. "So I bought one volume in English and a different one in French."

Foucault, twice over.

"Every year I give Severus a book on some esoteric subject. Two years ago was—"

"Magical glassblowing. Living so far out on the seaside it's very difficult to ship in the glass phials and bottles I use. It was an extremely useful gift," though rather in the line of Harry's socks. Usually he gives me things like a collection of magical fairy tales so frightening it comes with its own sedation spell, or a volume of collected works from around the world having to do with water spirits.

Whether on the practical end or, as I prefer, indulging the fanciful side I too often forget I possess, this is the first year Dumbledore has been so far off.

But he'd never know it because Harry is rolling on the floor laughing and I'm doing the equivalent from the grate.

"You like it?" Albus asks uncertainly. "I asked one of my contacts who is in the know in the muggle world what people read at French universities, and she told me emphatically you would be very interested in this Foucault chap."

"He's sort of omnipresent, but I've not actually read one of his books in its entirety," Harry ventures, turning over the volumes.

"One sometimes wonders if anyone has," I drawl, and say for Albus' benefit, "It's like the charms book you had us assigned my sixth year. One of the best there was, but it was unfortunately over many of our heads at the time."

"Severus has no patience for doing with a lot of arm-waving and shouting for what he can accomplish with much more dignity in private with his cauldron," Dumbledore confides to Harry and we all laugh.

It feels good to not be at odds for once, the three of us. Harry gives me a significant look and I retreat to France while he has some personal time with Albus. When Harry reappears in my apartment I take my turn.

"How is your work?" the old man asks as if I'm not constantly hounding him with questions about it.

"You are well aware. Not going very fast."

"As long as we can keep your department happy—and I can't imagine they wouldn't be very happy to have your unusual knowledge on their faculty—you can take your time. Harry seems to be holding his own physically as well as academically."

"It's more to do with a treatment I learned from a Vietnamese mage than with any of my methods, I'm afraid. You know I much prefer to advance my theories alongside practical work, but that's not possible outside of taking very calculated risks with Harry."

"Does the Animate Fungus offer any hope of a treatment?"

We chuckle. I've been filling Albus in on all the unexpected complications of introducing this creature to muggle doctors. "I've given him a dose, er, before and after intimacy and it doesn't appear to help. This one is mainly for skin lesions, but perhaps there are strains that may be more helpful for our situation. Maybe tracking down Animate life forms would be a better use of my time than what I'm doing."

"Severus, what you did with the monkey, it was the sort of ingenious healing technique that only you can provide. You're doing everything you can for Harry." Albus normally isn't so much in my corner on this subject, nor was he when I broke down and told him—very vaguely—about some unnerving traits Harry had been manifesting. At the time his response was that Harry's constantly being around the very person who shared in his trauma was probably reopening old wounds.

"Tell me how you identified this character trait in Harry," a more thoughtful Dumbledore is asking.

"You know I can't explain my senses very well," I say, not wanting to go into details for either of our sakes.

And we share one of our silences I'd not trade for anything else, one that encompasses how much I want to make things work with Harry, even though nobody, not him, sometimes not Harry is helping me. This month semester break comes none to soon, is what Dumbledore and I are thinking together. I can't continue at this rate. And floating somewhere in the room is the unspoken apology from the old wizard that he'd been only looking out for the ways that I could hurt Harry and not vice versa.

I've not been able to reveal that nightmarish experience to anyone except the person who added his ounce to my already-overflowing trauma coffers, and I'm glad to be able to tell someone without having to actually tell them aloud.

"Merry Christmas old friend," I say finally.

"Merry Christmas, Severus," he says. Fawkes even gives me a muttered wish for good health, breaking his vow to ignore me entirely taken right after I took The Mark.

_He is the marvelous Paracelsus, always drunk and always lucid, like the heroes of Rabelais._

_Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus the Great, by A.E. Waite_

"How was your audience?" I ask with good humor when I'm back in my flat with Harry.

"It was lovely, but Sev, why Foucault?" His gesture encompasses everything that the two books mean to us—they're like a food that, though we live in France fifty years, we're sure will never please our palate. I'm glad that Dumbledore's qualms about discussing sex must have precluded him from mentioning anything about some of Harry's recent struggles.

"Foucault is everything that reminds us we're English."

"That can't be the reason. He could've sent us a Cornish pasty or something."

"Albus Dumbledore never does anything without an agenda," I say. "Nor do I, so open your gift and find out what it is."

"No, you first," Harry says. "Close your eyes and I'll reconstitute them."

They are two very expensive shirts, one with a tie, the other with matching stockings. He must have used his artist's eye to convey both sets of measurements to the wizard tailor. Except the last, which must be from the Parisian wizard underworld, a place I didn't think he even knew how to locate.

"You and Julian have completely different coloring," he explains. "And you don't wear ties."

"You have exquisite taste, Harry, yet you only pay attention to what I wear. They're beautiful, thank you." His shoulders relax slightly. We've not talked very much about his "relationship with Julian" as he calls it, but a shirt and tie are a harmless gift.

When Harry opens the small box and sees the potion he groans. "There is no chance that I'm going to take any old thing and wait and see what it does to me like Dumbledore. What is it, another one of your healing concoctions?"

"No!" I snatch the golden box with the phial in it. "This isn't good for you."

"It's not?" he snatches it back. "What does it do?"

"Have you ever heard of China Cheer?"

His eyes grow wide. "Is this a recreational drug?"

I hold myself up very stiffly. "Some people call the judiciously applied intoxicant an agent for healing."

"Let's try some right now!" Harry is fumbling with the stopper.

"Wait, let me tell you what is in it first. China Cheer is the base, but there are a few other compounds bonded to it—"

"Do I drink the whole thing?" Harry has the stopper off.

"Par le trismégiste! Give me that before you go to an early grave." Sheepishly, he hands it over. "Put on your coat first. We'll want to go out and once I spent an entire evening trying to put both of my arms in the same arm of my jacket."

We hurry into our winter things and then I order Harry to stick out his tongue. Two drops of the golden fluid drop onto his tongue.

He watches me produce another phial. "You mean you're not going to feel the same thing as me?" He asks, disappointed.

"On the contrary, this compound will ensure that I do feel the same thing. China Cheer has very little effect upon my system."

A more generous serving of the golden liquid is mixed in a small cup with the second fluid, and I drink it down.

Harry's eyes are shining when I look up. "Have you taken this sort of thing a lot?"

I open the door. "Have I frequently struck you as particularly Cheerful at any point in the past?"

"No," he giggles, beginning to look quite Cheerful himself.

In a minute we're out into the cold Paris night.

Though it is a cold night, the holiday season seems to exert an irresistible allure on the entire city. Scowling delinquents, veiled Muslim women, jaded policemen—they all wander around as if part of the same event for once. Paris is at truce with itself.

Which makes Harry and me feel our difference more acutely than usual.

"Do you think they know?" Harry whispers to me, his eyes slightly dilated.

"Know what?" I whisper, walking very close.

"That we're a different species."

And at those words we're transported to another time right in the middle of the present.

We're the first two magicians. From the cover of his coat Harry's wand draws a bit of magic out of the air and there is light. It is the second discovery of fire. That is where the path becomes parallel. The two species, never to understand each other. We weep for the fissure in humanity.

Then I envy them their ignorance. Then ignorance makes me think of innocence and innocence reminds me of guilt.

"Do you think they know?" I whisper to him as we walk around a throng of parents and children.

"Know what?" Harry waves at some children with rosy cheeks and they wave back.

"That I'm a serial killer," I mumble.

Harry turns away from the children. "Oh come now, Severus, don't put on airs. You aren't organized enough to be a serial killer."

"Really?"

"No, true evil has some kind of style. You only ever managed to be bad, and that you bumbled your way into and then sniveled your way out of," he says in a mellifluous tone that sounds like the very essence of love in my ears.

"Really? You mean it?" I grab his arm, wanting to engrave every detail of my savior into my mind.

"Severus?"

"Yes, Harry?" This is truth and my soul is parched for it.

"Snapping my arm in half would be a great way to start that career in evil you so desire."

"Sorry, Harry." I loosen my grip, but the touch has produced a profound effect on both of us.

"Do you think they know?" Harry asks as we press our noses against an electronics store window where the televisions are all displaying different programs.

"Know what?" A politician is looking oddly like the British Minister of Magic, and I could have sworn there was an old man who looked like Dumbledore that flashed upon another screen.

"What I'm going to do to you later." Harry's hand grows into my arm like a sensual obsession that, once loosed, can never be extricated. His touch grows all through my muscles and down to my feet. Our skin is unbearably hot under our winter wraps, we—

Suddenly the image he flashes in my mind strikes me as wrong with all the people shuffling by my Julian form.

"I should hope not! My father wasn't a deviant a day in his life, and that ought to be clear from his face."

The awareness that Harry had this form once flashes between us and we grow silent. It's suddenly unbearably cold. I move towards a small park that has a municipal heating duct that will give us some relief.

A bird settles in its nest nearby, "What do you think they would do if we went in their bedroom while they were trying to sleep?" she grumbles to her mate.

"I'd say the more the merrier," Harry replies, rubbing his hands.

"Harry, that was a bird!"

"It was? I understand the bird language! Did it understand me?"

"No, you're speaking English. Allow me," and I translate Harry's comment.

"Your parlor trick is very amusing, sir, but would you mind terribly taking it to a more appreciative audience?"

"They talk, they talk just like," Harry is doubled over on the cold ground. "They talk just like you!"

"Birds are very intelligent," I shoot back in their language.

"Very flattering, coming from two who look like they hit the ground the first time they were pushed out of the nest."

"Don't you know of me? I'm 'That Lout.'"

"I can see that," the bird says drily.

"What did you call yourself?" Harry cackles, hearing my Bird name for the first time.

"You're missing an entire cultural context," I hiss.

"Can't you go and be That Lout and speak the Ancient Tongue with your Vulgarian friend somewhere else?"

"I'll have you know that Harry here is known as the savior of our nation."

"Is that so? Well you might want to save your savior from catching cold, because only a madman would be rolling around on the ground in this weather."

"The way you—look when you make those—neck movements for emphasis, it's—" Harry's got twigs in his hair and he's crying with mirth.

"Perhaps there is room for one more, madam? I can warm the nest for you."

Harry kicks my legs out from under me and topples me to the ground and we hold each other for a few minutes, shivering more out of delight than cold. Then we get up and wander somewhere else.

As could be expected, I can't say for certain everything we did that night. We wandered among the muggles and felt their otherness as a palpable thing, we felt as though we were extraterrestrials watching a foreign race that was foolish enough to think itself alone in the universe. This is just the sort of illusion the drug can foster, because of course neither Harry nor I is of pure blood. No, the experience is about giving oneself wholly over to the most suggestible part of one's mind. We elbowed each other and laughed over the way the cars seemed to have very French expressions all of a sudden, and we had to push each other to keep moving when one of us got overwhelmed by the music of the city that suddenly pieced itself together in our ears.

Things got confused after that. Harry says we went to a cinema but I suspect we might have just been staring off into space and imagining we were watching a film. We did go in a late-night café for hot chocolate, which we drank as if we were back at Hogwarts as children. The effects seemed to be lessening somewhat with the chocolate in our stomachs when Harry touched his pocket. "You know, I still have the books in here."

"We'll just have to be very convincing when we tell Albus we enjoyed them, but go ahead and throw them out, Harry."

"You wouldn't," he says with mock-disapproval, fishing out the shrunken volumes.

"Watch me." I reconstitute the books under the table and take mine. "What do I want to do to the man that makes every research faculty meeting more tedious than it already is?"

"You can't have it worse than I do," Harry protests. "It's in class, every class. Even art studio they drag the poor bastard in."

We stare at the volumes that seem to have nothing at all to do with Albus Dumbledore. "Hang on, do you think they're magical books?" Harry exclaims, turning over the gifts with his wand in his sleeve, and mumbling a few revealing charms.

I run my hand over them to make sure, but they have less magic than a stone. "Take it from someone who knows, my friend, these are the muggle-est books there ever were." I throw some money on the table. "Come on." Harry rushes to follow me to a dark corner, and I grab him to fly us on top of a tall building.

"You never told me you could do that," Harry says breathlessly.

"It never occurred to me to try before." The French volume in my hand, I throw it into the air and when my clumsily constructed charm turns it into a bird I'm more surprised than anyone.

"You're not terrible at charms, Severus!" Harry hugs me in the whipping wind and the bird is blinking at us. We're embarrassed to be confronted with the living exemplar of something we've been so unkind to.

"How do you do?" Harry says finally. "I'm Harry, and this is Severus."

The bird says something.

"This potion must be wearing off. I didn't understand any of that. What did he say?"

The bird says something else more insistently.

"Haven't a clue."

After a few more tries, the bird flies off, hopefully to find kindred spirits somewhere among the French bird population.

"What are you going to do with yours?" I ask after we've stood arm in arm, looking down at the toy city beneath us some minutes.

"Oh! I forgot. I don't know."

But he soon did know.

At this point I can't claim total intoxication, because I knew exactly what we were doing in some part of my mind. I just didn't care.

Though it is bitterly cold he takes off his clothes.

He shrinks them and puts them in my pocket. Quickly I envelop him in a bubble of warm air and he climbs on my back.

Harry and I fly as fast as I dare and much closer to people than I should so Harry can rip out page after page and shout "The emperor has no clothes!" as he showers Paris with shreds of the philosopher's collected works.

At that moment it starts to snow in Paris.

"Severus, I made it snow!" Harry yells in my ear.

It's just the sort of coincidence that tends to happen on the drug, so I don't make an issue of it. It's our time to believe in the sort of magic that we stopped believing in once we really understood we were wizards.

I fly us back to the building and Harry spells on his clothes as quickly as he can. Back down on the street we walk with reddened, exhilarated faces through a city that we are both convinced is being coated by our most hated French philosopher. We are suddenly at peace with him coating everything—the streets, the sidewalks, the people.

We've done what we came to do tonight. We made the city ours.

It's over very fast. Too fast.

If only we'd flown a little slower.

Because I flew so fast within inhabited territory that we did cause a minor International incident. Some muggle warning system caught our path—though thankfully we were going too fast to leave a clear picture—and for weeks there was minor speculation in the newspaper about the "rogue aircraft" that was eventually dismissed as the prank it was.

But we didn't know that this evening when we apparate into my apartment. "Warm bath, now," I say, and he doesn't argue at that, or a dose of the Vietnamese healing smoke, or the foul-tasting potion that we drink to avoid the frightful hangover I assure him would otherwise await us.

The trident reveals his magic is in fine form.

"Did you and Albus cook up this whole business when you spoke to him alone?" Harry asks from under the mound of blankets I've piled on him.

"No, we only talked about, you know, the things we talk about. Remedies and such." A flicker of what Dumbledore heard me not say must have reached my face, because Harry looks through narrowed eyes. "Do you honestly think Dumbledore would be party to you being outside unclothed in this weather?"

"No, probably not." He's settling sleepily against the headboard when I give him the other box.

"What we did tonight was for both of us. This is for you."

Harry slips off the ribbon eagerly and finds that the box contains two books. He looks at the top one uncertainly.

"Herbert and Bandicoot's Chimeric of Charms?"

"It's the sixth-year charms book I referred to earlier. Your father was probably the only person who understood it at Hogwarts with the dubious exception of the instructor. Since it never made a bit of sense to me I assumed you would understand it perfectly."

Harry sends a grin my way but his hands are tracing over the embossed binding in a way that I know has nothing to do with our waning intoxication. This is something he's good at. Not something he has to contort his brain into like French or history or calculus.

It's the kind of magic that's in his blood.

"Severus, this feels like me, the real me. Like home. I needed something like this." He puts his arm around me and kisses me. "What shall I learn first?"

"There's another book there," I point.

He reads the gilt inscription on the handsome volume, the result of another kit obtained from the Bibliophile underworld: "'Grand-mère's Collection of Expurgated Fairy Tales'?" He snorts. "Don't you think I'm old enough to read the unexpurgated versions?"

Taking care not to let him see what I'm doing, I cast the charm that makes the cover read "Unexpurgated Fairy Tales." "You asked for it."

Harry opens the book eagerly and reads for a few moments. His face turns purple. "That's outrageous! Who would ever claim that 'miscegenation,' as she calls it, is the reason why the Dodo went extinct?"

In a moment the volume has been reverted to its previous state. "I wanted to spare you some of grand-mère's views on racial purity, as I did your mother."

"You told these to her? She liked stories?"

"Oh, yes, she liked stories. Although about some of these she just said 'they explain a lot,' take that how you will. You'll see 'The Emperor's New Clothes' is in there, but in her version it's a cautionary tale about casting charms clumsily so they wear off at the wrong moment."

"You had them written by a charmed quill and professionally bound? Severus, these are two, three beautiful presents counting the China Cheer. All I got you were two shirts."

"And a tie. And some stockings."

We completely forget about the former in our exploration of the latter.

The next morning Harry has left me a note on the pillow where he had lately been sleeping. Actually he used his new charms book to spell it as in a glimmering script on the pillow. It disappears after I read it, and I curse at the intellect he and his father have to be able to manage such an effect when not even the index of that book makes sense to most people.

My lips curve up while reading his wild scrawl that has never calmed down from his boyhood parchments so long ago. "Gone to get a decent cuppa," are his exact words. Harry can't understand why I can create a compound that will make you float in the air or grow to three times your normal size, but I can't create what he will recognize as a decent cup of coffee.

It's actually become one of our pastimes here in Paris, trying to figure out why some things are so delightful here in some unquantifiable way. Why drinking a piss-poor bottle of wine in a French dive is often more satisfying than a fine glass in a posh English restaurant. Then there's the bread, of course, but it's the café experience in general that has both of our distinct but acute intelligences trying to isolate the appeal inherent in one or another of these poky establishments.

"You can't sense the magics or whatnot?" Harry hisses at me in some of these cafes.

"No, Harry, I mean, yes. It's coffee. Coffee and water."

"So it's all in our head or something?"

"C'est l'ambiance," I shrug.

Apparently this is one of my occasional spot-on Gallic gestures, which Harry rewards richly when they occur, though I am helpless to produce them on demand. I do think I was rewarded handsomely that time.

Wrapping my dressing-gown around me I stare out the window at the lazy flakes of snow falling and then wander into the kitchen. On the table I find another note, or I do once I can tear my eyes away from the thing Harry has left me on the cluttered dining table.

It's a drawing.

Those three words do not explain the discomfiting experience of finding myself rendered by Harry's gifted hand.

The background is not finished, so it depicts me in a bathtub as if floating in space. No sensitive zones are revealed, but I've never felt more revealed in all my life. My hair is undone to its full length except for one braid that my right hand is un-knotting, and the dark locks are spilling down my shoulders and out of the tub, which is an old, clawfoot tub that's too small for someone of my height. My left hand is closest to the viewer and hanging elegantly over the side. My arms and legs are spilling out along with my black hair, with the effect of making me look like a spider with untidy limbs everywhere. Since I've always had a soft spot for spiders, this is not an unwelcome likeness. I can actually recognize myself in this person, in a way I only intellectually do when I leave my body and look back on it.

The tub was from the hotel we stayed in while on our first holiday in Antibes, but I honestly can't remember the occasion this might have been inspired by. There's a window half-finished to one side that is in the wrong place for that bathroom, but it reminds me of the high, square window with the ledge where Hedwig comes in and out in this apartment's bathroom, and the green checkered linoleum that stretches across part of the floor was taken from Harry's London flat.

All that is to say that this is not really a portrait of one moment, but the distillation of a relationship.

My gaze, looking right at the viewer, is like an enormous tree with many concentric rings:

The outer ring: annoyance, apparently my default attitude with the world.

Next: A defensive formality that harmonizes very well, somehow, with my bare limbs hanging languidly over the porcelain fixture.

Then come layers of humor, a kind of justice, vulnerability, sensuality, self-doubt…

Right at the center are two qualities that seem equally essential to the portrait: an unflinching acceptance, and a strength that comes from some place I've never noticed in myself. The whole effect is eerie. It really is like looking at oneself through another's eyes, and at the core of this black gaze of mine there is an odd reflection of the viewer, as if to say, "Yes, I know, that is what you are seeing, isn't it?"

But, just like Harry's other pictures, it's what's just out of frame that completes the piece. In this case, it's the circuit completed by my eyes and Harry's unpictured eyes.

Now I can see why people find us to be overly intense together. This circuit between us is like the magic cast by a wand, or a piano wire stretched between two points: only a fool would stumble in between that connection.

That's what I'm thinking when my eyes fall on the note.

_Happy Christmas, Sev. I felt bad not getting you anything more personal, but, well, I have a couple of sketchbooks filled with my attempts to draw you and they never come out the way I want. This was the most finished, and since you seem most at home in the water I thought you could appreciate the idea if not the execution._

_Let's not talk of it, all right? It's not your potions metaphors, love, which I find quite adorable, it's just that if I can't express what I see properly without words, adding words in the mix just makes it more dishonest and clumsy. I know you understand._

_Love always,_

_Harry_

My eyes meet my eyes and it's the oddest sensation of feeling my passion radiating into my own heart.

This is the image of love.

And I'm not sure I'm equal to it.

The door opens.

"It's beautiful out there! I'm going sketching after breakfast, and you're coming too," Harry calls, crinkling paper sacks and stomping off his boots.

Before I can hide the drawing his eyes fall on it.

"I'm sorry, Harry, I was just—"

"Don't worry about it. Here, Café Beauborg was open, so I got you your black coffee with honey. The shop-girl that is in love with you said to tell you happy Christmas."

He distributes the breakfast things and I pick up the picture carefully to shift it on top of a bookcase where it won't be crumpled or spilled on like all my other papers. Harry catches the care in my gesture. "Don't mount it or anything. I'm still intending on finishing it at some point. Leave it somewhere where I can work on it when the mood strikes. That's usually how I do my best work; when I try too hard everything comes out dismal."

Because I can't resist I ask the question that's nagging me. "Do I really look at you like that?"

He takes a sip of his coffee and makes a satisfied noise. His face is still flushed from the outdoors and he's kept his wool scarf around his neck. "Sometimes," he says finally. "When you're not busy being tiresome."

I sit on his lap and he feeds fresh bread to me like a baby bird.


	50. Chapter 50

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 50: Happiness

Harry and I spend the rest of our holiday either on our own work or socializing with Tristan, his parents and some of the other Parisian magical folk. Perhaps one of the many reasons they find us suspicious is that we need their company so desperately. We are both surprised at how much we fuss over each other's appearance before these casual gatherings, as if we suddenly enjoy the inspection we've resented our entire relationship.

It's our second Christmas together, after all, and just like the last, we're spending it with a sort of family. Last holiday was special beyond words because of the Little Witches, and with that one brief glimpse of normalcy the Douays offered us. This year our adult company is a bit more realistically familiar, however, because if they don't know all of us, they know most of us.

Tristan and Harry and other young magical folk spend time running around in the intermittent snow with or without brooms in a way I am incapable of unless Harry and I are alone or on mind-altering chemicals. This leaves me with the parents and other adults, and if that puts us once more on opposite sides of a divide, no one says anything. Instead, there are tall tales traded at the level of a mutter (Pascal is one for deadpan story delivery much like my grandmother) and recollections of holiday celebrations of old from all over the world (again, from my grandmother's age of spectacle) and the somewhat stilted relationship between Pascal and Belda and me is probably as much as I can attain with humans other than Harry.

Belda, as I get to know her, unnerves me a little. She and I are both mostly silent and reflective, so we tower over our respective partners and try to fill that lofty space with something where we are accustomed to being alone.

Her younger children, all girls, are recently old enough to take care of each other, for the most part, so she is beginning her own business: dream interpretation. I can't tell you how many times I wish I had a trusted chiromancer specializing in dreams, as I have had several important but completely inscrutable dreams, the most notable being the dreams of war that Lilly and I shared, and of course the one about my Aunt Adele. Alas, I have never been able to trust anyone and now that habit is ingrained, so I can't test Belda's gifts for myself. I do know that many people from the Arabic parts of the world are very gifted in this area, and I also see that many people are beginning to trust her enough to try out her skills.

Belda spends a lot of time at Gregor's, where, for a fee, he is letting her run her operations for now. Unlike other forms of divination, a dream remembered exists in the past, so it is not as important to have a neutral magical space, quiet, or anything else for her to ply her trade. Most of the time someone will seek her out to ask what a dream meant. Sometimes she will dream about you, but she never divulges this unless you ask in an official session. Otherwise it would be considered an invasion, a sort of forcing you to pay her to tell you what she dreamt, tantamount to blackmail, and if she were so inclined, she could intimidate people with false fears or steer them into unwise investments. This is the trust aspect that is so important when dealing with someone who is an adept of the Dream Plane, a place I hope never to meet her.

While Pascal and I are looking at each other out of the corner of our eyes, Belda and I are doing the same on a more subtle plane. Pretending that I am not a Legillimens of rare talent is like pretending to be deaf and blind, and to anyone who vibrates near the same frequency it must be like sitting next to a steady loud noise. But this woman seems to possess something few people do: real discretion. Others are gradually realizing the same, and she can be found more and more often in the corner of the bar, sharing her insights on love dreams and nightmares with a complete lack of fanfare.

"Looks like she's talking about recipes, doesn't she?" Gregor nodded at the woman one day when I ordered. "She's got something, though, I must say. She told me a few things I'd never tell anyone." Squibs are known to have intense and often disturbing dreams, as it is usually their only outlet into the magical realms that are otherwise closed to them.

Then Harry and his lot will come in from whatever they have been doing, and he'll put his arm around me and everything is all right. His eyes will flash with an awareness of how still we all were sitting, and how he knows himself to possess the key that will unlock me from this formal posture most magical folk adopt for defensive reasons. His cold-reddened skin will melt me in a second, and keeping the bridge across our two generations with that arm, he will make one of his typical jests designed to keep people from looking at us as anything other than a perfectly natural phenomenon, and then everyone is friends again.

Other than these holiday occasions, celebrated at Gregor's bar and elsewhere, I do have to select Mick's food for the day, but this process seems to be getting less difficult as we get to know each other better. It's just a matter of selecting the item from the store and dropping it at the lab. Andre's team has discovered that he doesn't have to eat once a day, though he does like to have marbles and other objects set out to discover.

Since we are out with our wizard counterparts so often, I spend more and more time with Harry as Julian. I will not allow it in the bedroom, or behind closed doors. One of my projects over the break is to engineer a sort of warning system in my flat. The potion spread around the apartment causes a tingling sensation if I'm there in a transfigured form. Harry watches me do the same in his apartment because I think I owe it to him to be open about it.

If he is disappointed at this signal of my resolve to never allow him a "date" with Julian again, he doesn't let on. I occasionally see him cleaning his glasses as an excuse to look at me in public, but I try not to take it very seriously. Perhaps this mostly fictional man Julian is who I would have been if my luck hadn't been so bad. If I hadn't taken The Mark.

But I can't shed who I am at the door to my flat as I do my father's form. I still drain Harry. When he lets me.

"Mm, Jul-Sev (Jul-Sev is my new name), that feels wonderful but I can't tonight. I want to go ride my broom tomorrow with Tristan and I can't if we—"

"I want to but we're meeting for a game tomorrow, remember? Everyone will notice if I don't play, and if I do I want to make sure my spear obeys me. Quidditch is a walk in the park compared to their sport."

Severus Snape is overworked and undersexed. For once, I don't mind.

Spending time with Rukmini is oddly a partial substitute for physical closeness. I come just to listen to the song of someone's life other than my own. That's what I used to seek in my mercenary encounters years ago. It is terrible being alone with my strange fate, and this escape into the hinterlands of a muggle's mind seem to fit the bill.

Rukmini's song is all jumbled notes up for hours on end and then a few bars prove that it's music after all. It reminds me a bit of my madness, minus the moth's voice. There are brief pictures that come to me, and as with my mother, I can't tell if I'm imagining them there because I need them, or if they're actual fragments of this woman's mind. I'm discovering, though, that these pictures, which are qualitatively different than those of any magical mind I've ever experienced—and I've gotten into at least the antechambers of hundreds—when seen from up close have a logic laid bare that is like magic.

"We're the same species," I whisper deep into her silent brain. "Think of me as a long-lost relation that's not close enough to be bothersome."

Then I place images in her mind from my recent apparations to the areas of India where she used to live. This is one of my main pursuits over the semester break, actually: to try and isolate what trauma she might have seen the first time that overwhelmed her system at the moment of the second trauma.

These excursions to Asia are very different than the ones I've made seeking a particular plant or healer. I mix with crowds of people, walking as slowly as I dare so that all the impressions seek deeply into my memory for future sharing with a comatose stranger. Who knows what Spagyrics make up a memory? If nothing else, my feeble attempts to help Rukmini are leading to interesting ideas about human psychology.

Images from Jharkhand are floating like bits of colored paper down a dark, deep well when I sense something beginning to shift in the atmosphere of the hospital unit.

Shanti is coming down the hall. I reappear with the illustrated book on India I brought to jog my memory, right before Rukmini's cousin walks in.

"They didn't tell me you were here," she says looking pleased. "How are you?"

A ghost nudges me about the same words uttered in a far-off library.

"Forgive me," I chuckle when I realize I didn't answer her. "I've been far away. Rukmini takes me places. And how are you, Shanti-ma? Do you have much of a holiday from your practice?"

Shanti places some flowers in the vase and discards the old ones. She takes an unusually long time in answering, herself.

"You know, Julian, I never told you that when you gave me that lotion the first day we met, it took my headache away. I get low-level headaches often because my work requires so much concentration, and I can only take so much of any remedy, holistic or over the counter, before it irritates my stomach. But this: immediate relief. Of both the headache and any underlying tension."

My heart is thudding at this, my Paracelsan science's first breakthrough with a muggle, but I force myself to remain impassive. "Go on."

She looks embarrassed, an expression that sits oddly on her features. "I liked this treatment so much I thought you must be playing some trick on me. That it was some illegal or addictive substance, cocaine or something that people in South America put, in small amounts, in a variety of treatments. Nothing works that well, was my thinking. And when a couple hours later I saw that it took away the eczema that has always bothered my left hand particularly, I was sure there was something unwholesome at work. What cures both headache and eczema?"

"I don't know. I'm as surprised as you. This is why I wanted to come practice at the Institute. There are certain things I've encountered in my travels that I know to be powerful healing agents when used in the right combination on the right person, but to understand more I need subjects." My eyes twinkle. "Perhaps not everyone is so daring about smearing strange lotions on themselves as Shanti-ma."

She does this tilt to her shoulders that I am learning does not indicate annoyance but mirth. "What are the chances of these treatments being harmful?"

I choose my words carefully. "What I am looking to do is less to treat than to track individual responses to these compounds, which are not treatments at all, but the building blocks of treatments. At the worst, they might have a moment of excessive hot or cold, easily wiped off with a cloth. If someone has a strong positive reaction like yours, it will be apparent immediately. If not, they have the satisfaction of having advanced a fledgling science."

She bursts out laughing. "Do you know what you looked like when you said that just now?"

My hands shoot to my face in fear that my transfiguration slipped or some other ghastly thing happened.

She takes her cousin's hand and buries her head with its mass of black curls in the sheets beside Rukmini. Her shoulders are shaking. "Mini, he has no idea what effect those manners are going to have on my rheumatic old ladies."

Apparently, I must have done something right, because Shanti-ma is very definitely not a rheumatic old lady, and by the time I have put on my coat we've made definite plans for me to come to The Sun after hours to experiment on her, my new and unnerving test subject.

For the next 24 hours I do nothing but refer to my old Paracelsan tomes and assemble substances I think might work on muggles. I'm buried in a chaos of samples and powders I'm constantly shuffling according to different hypotheses about the great unknown: the muggle system.

"I knew you wouldn't remember so I came early to remind you," Harry says, appearing in my flat.

"Oh, love, I did forget about the play. Will you tell Pascal and everyone I'm sorry I'll have to miss it?"

"It's not Pascal who you should be apologizing to," Harry says playfully and I see that he's looking especially handsome in his nice outfit. When he dresses in these clothes that are more like what our culture associates with men, as opposed to the extended boyhood the muggle world allows students of Harry's age, I can hardly believe my good fortune when he holds out his hand to me as he does now to help me out of the mess on the carpet. "We still have a week left of holiday, and this is what you want to do, play with muggles instead of me?"

I take this man's hand and hold it, staying where I am. "It's not a matter of want, Harry. It's our good fortune that this muggle woman has volunteered her time to let me test a full battery of compounds. This may be the beginning of the integration of Wizard science with these people that make no sense to me at all."

"Come spend the evening with people that do make sense to you," Harry says, crouching behind me and rubbing my neck. "I love watching all the paranoid thoughts flying around. You and Pascal crack me up with the way you look at each other."

"Like what?" I ask, relaxing into the touch.

"Like the way Professor McGonegall and you would look at each other when you would end up as partners in the Wizard Quadrille. You would put your hands about a mile away from each other's fingertips as if you were supposed to touch a poisonous toad, and those five seconds before you passed on to another partner were an eternity."

All the stifling resentment of that one mandatory traditional dance comes rushing back, and then picturing the squat Algerian in the reluctant Minerva's place has me splitting my sides along with Harry.

"I don't think Pascal would thank you for that image. Nor do I, because it will be that much harder to keep a straight face and you know he thinks I'm up to something."

"You are up to something."

The reality that I am pulling one over on a bunch of magicians always gives me pause, and then I follow his gaze and gesture. "Don't be impertinent," I snap professorially, swatting away his hand.

"We haven't had a good insult match in a long time," Harry says longingly. "Are you too much of a lily-livered lass to hear the terms of my wager, you boot-licking bumbler?"

"Mr. Potter—" The desire rushes around my body like a wildfire. It takes all my strength to clench my fists. "Harry?"

"Already tongue-tied, Snape? It's no fun when you don't put up a fight, you pathetic excuse for a professor."

"Do you want me to figure out how we can be together as much as we want, with no ill effects, or not?"

He is suddenly completely serious. "You know I do."

"What I'm going to do this evening is why we came to Paris." I sigh. "There's nothing I would like better than to be on your arm tonight, no matter where it would be."

He gets up and puts on his jacket. Instead of saying goodbye and apparating away, Harry stands there for awhile watching me collect a couple of beetles from where they've gotten into some dried moss.

"You know something, Severus? I don't care if you don't figure it out."

"What? Are you mad?"

"No, no I'm not mad. I'm happy" He sits down again. "We're happy."

He grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls my forehead to his.

"This is what happiness is," he states, swaying our heads to and fro with each word. "We're just too deprived to recognize it. We have friends; we're studying things that really interest us. And most of all, nobody is bothering us. So what if we have to be careful?"

Before I can fill in the obvious, Harry continues, "You can't deny it, Severus. You need this, all of these samples and specimens and experiments. You've been waiting your whole life for this. The first drawing I did made me realize that I'd been choking up until that point. Like I almost couldn't breathe because of this thing that had me by the throat trying to get out. You must have felt the same all those years teaching snotty kids how to do elementary potions when you need so much more, you can do—whatever you're doing with that fungus thing. Maybe you'll discover a cure for a disease, if you can keep it from dying from unhappiness in that muggle laboratory."

It surprises me that he's grasped Mick's precarious situation, or his potentially revolutionary impact on medicine.

"But when I showed you my pictures and you were being so encouraging it pissed me off, as if you were saying that I wasn't good enough without doing art, or producing something. You don't know how little I did those four years."

"You thought this, mon amant? I just wanted you to be happy."

"Now I see that, because watching you playing around with your bugs and your phials and trying to do this thing no one's thought of doing before—you've never looked better and I've never loved you more."

Suddenly he reaches over and takes my hand.

"Severus, it will only take me a little longer to finish school—because I have to finish, I've decided—and then we can make our own wizard school."

Reflexively, we both look down at my hands, remembering the sight of Mathilde's orange magic coating them. I hide them behind my back. "No. Not with me."

"No, Sev, I won't have it! If Dumbledore could ward Hogwarts so it was safe, we can do it. I loved us working together to teach the Little Witches, I want to do that again, making something together, I want it always."

Of course, I count the experience as some of our best days together too.

"What should we make?" I ask, my hand molding his contours.

"Show me the colors again,"

"This beetle is a strong green," I say, picking up the beetle crawling nearby, the one with the red and black carapace.

"Emerald green? Kelly green?" Harry asks and the sketchpad and pastels he habitually carries shrunken in his pocket are in his hand.

"Emerald, I would say. And this salt is a red, so don't touch. And this bark is pink."

"Pink like this?" He muddles two pastels together.

"Yes, my love, very close! I've told you your paintings are often magically accurate." We beam at each other. Maybe we are moving closer together after all. We play our new color game for some time, taking turns teaching. Harry sketches how he sees each item and I shyly add some colors to the page.

Then I can't help myself.

"You are an exceptionally beautiful man and I love—us, who we are together," I say in a rush before my usual emotional mutism takes hold.

Harry looks up, moved. "You never say things like that."

"I have some sort of impediment."

"Severus, you're nothing but impediments," Harry says, pulling at my clothes as some of the obstacles that most concern him at the moment.

But we know. He needs all his magic if he's going to spend time with magical folk.

"We're luckier than most," Harry points out, leaning back. "We found each other."

"I think it was more like you showed up at my door shouting several dozen good reasons why it was stupid to be apart, among other incisive points."

"Was I wrong?"

"You're usually not," I tell this mouth that is the inlet to the warm, intelligent, vibrant sea that is yet a man who is, strangely, mine.

And our lips convey to each other everything we would do together if we weren't too smart to stop.

"You take the couch," Harry says, shedding his clothes in a second.

He stands at the opposite end of the room, in the hallway near the door, while I divest myself. He then intones the charm he made, which only someone who can make sense of Herbert and Bandicoot's Chimeric of Charms would have been able to devise.

The two shimmering translucent pools appear, one extending like a window in front of each of us. We stretch out our hands and feel each other's touch though we're a few yards apart. And in a whisper that reaches his ears just fine, I tell Harry what it feels like to be taken apart and put back together by his skin that is rippling against mine, so close, closer than close, because with a bond like ours, nothing can keep us apart.

"Tell Pascal I'll make the ticket up to him," I tell Harry as he leaves.

And it is with a bittersweet happiness that I watch Harry disappear with an afterglow, something I've given him that wasn't canceled out by what I usually take away.

There are a lot of inconveniences about muggle company, but one of the worst is that you can't shrink things down and carry them in your pocket until you need to reconstitute them. For someone like me, I'm constantly needing to carry a ton of samples and assorted gear around, and rather than actually cart around these delicate specimens full-size, I just have the habit of arriving early everywhere so no one witnesses me pulling my supplies out of what appears to be thin air.

This evening I'm meeting Shanti at the end of her shift, so this stratagem won't work. My cursing at hauling dozens of cases into the Institute must contrast oddly with my own afterglow that I can feel oozing through both of my skins.

"Are you ready to be a, er, guinea pig?" I catch myself just in time before saying "Bandy-legged Mole," which is what adepts traditionally used to experiment on because they are nearly neutral in magical qualities. They're ill-tempered little beasts, however, especially now that I can understand what they're saying, so I prefer to use mice and correct for their properties when creating potions.

Unpacking all of my specimens I've been too excited to notice that Shanti looks tired until she says wearily, "Could we skip to the lotion you gave me the other day?"

My hand automatically reaches for the trident I didn't bring because it would be useless with muggles. This reminds me not to whisper any of the spells I habitually use to wipe the slate clean, so to speak, before any treatment or test. The Vietnamese sage's rejection of this foundational principle of wizarding magic has stuck with me, but doing without these charms means an infinite number of additional variables where I'm already working blind.

"You will permit me to apply it?" I take her hand and touch her forehead. There is a subtle difference to the warmth compared to what I have come to recognize as her usual temperature. She merely sits there and lets me paint the stripe on her forehead and then watches me use the special pattern on her wand-hand.

"Miraculous," she says after a moment.

"In the sense that I have no explanation for it as yet, yes, it is."

I lay out the samples I've chosen as being most likely to affect her, and she brings her finger to the bird case. "You can play with her in a moment," my hand stops Shanti from petting the bird. "Also do not touch this," I point to a smaller cage with a large beetle.

"Ugh. I wouldn't."

Once the calibration potions and the salts and live plants and other things are lined up, I unfasten the larger cage.

"Anouk, you can come out," I say, knowing it sounds like whistling to Shanti's ears.

The small bird is a dazzling white with a brown stripe to its wings and back, and a blue beak, but what is most noteworthy about her is that one leg is shorter than the other. When she hops on the table she does so like a tiny drunken sailor. With this deformity Anouk is better off in captivity than in her native Borneo, and she's also a pure Active Cool test sample like none other, so I have allowed myself to get attached to her.

"Let me use this neutralizing lotion to remove what we just treated you with," I say and wipe off the compound that would contaminate my experiments. "Put your w-writing hand palm-up and just relax and tell me what you feel: cold, hot, or nothing."

As Anouk and I had arranged, she nudges Shanti's hand a few times with her fluffy little head. Once that reaction is noted, my bird friend is free to wander around as long as she doesn't get into anything. Meanwhile, each substance is held above Shanti's hand for long enough that she either has a reaction, or is clearly not going to have one.

The muggle woman watches me intent on comparisons and taking notes and then she asks, "Can I talk?"

"Please," I urge, writing down her unexpectedly strong cold reaction to the beetle, which was quite apart from her horrified delight at feeling its horns quiver on her skin. "Tell me about the Institute."

"We're a bunch of people from everywhere who need a space to practice our particular healing art. I'm just your garden-variety Reiki practitioner, so some of them look on me as rather old hat. You've met the man with the snake?"

"Oh yes. I've seen that done before in Bangladesh. Seems an impractical thing to practice in the middle of Paris. I hope he doesn't take that snake on the metro."

My concern was for the poor snake putting up with all that rattling and clattering, but Shanti gasps at the idea of unwittingly riding the train next to a large snake hidden in the bag the man carries. Perhaps it's my near-total ignorance of muggle reactions or my general thick-headedness with all humans, but it's taken me some time to realize that when she is horrified she can also be delighted.

"Wait. I feel a very strong reaction to this salt," I say before she can open her mouth to tell me the same.

"How did you know that? It's very warm," she says. "Is this a good thing?"

If only I had a flame. My fingers itch with the desire to conjure some light.

This would ruin everything, so I settle for the next best thing. "Do you trust me to put a little of this salt on your skin? At the very worst it will do nothing." She hesitates and then nods. I put some in my palm. "You see, it is not caustic."

Quickly I put a different salt as a control between our palms and send a mild charge. "It's warm," she says, and through the bit of magic I'd have to say the same about her skin against mine.

Then we do the first salt. "Wow." She pulls her hand away. "That tingles and it's hot. No, wait, don't stop. Let me feel that again. It makes me want to laugh," and she does laugh. I start laughing too. Here I am, palm to palm with a muggle, practicing the arts my mother taught me. This woman's hand is not like cotton-wool. I actually feel something, another human at the end of this arm, unlike my foray into muggle society years ago.

Maybe our ends of the human spectrum aren't as far apart as I thought. There could be a key that can unlock all humans' systems for me so that I can experiment upon the much wider pool of non-magical humans. Perhaps I can bottle up some of their imperviousness to Alkahests and administer it to Harry.

To touch my lover without fear. That's all I ask.

"This has been most helpful," I say, gathering up my things along with the beetle and Anouk. "May I come on Saturday to seek some other volunteers?"

"On one condition," she replies. "That I sit in on one of your classes."

This takes me aback. Harry has never expressed any interest in such a thing. "If it is too complicated, don't worry. Impulsivity is one of my peculiarities." I merely raise my eyebrows at this reference to my confession about my peculiarity with touch. Which I seem to have forgotten all about during these experiments.

"You are welcome to my classes, but in at least one of them you would be in danger of dying from boredom. Are you free on Tuesday or Thursday from 1-2:30?"

_This unexpected affinity would remain in obscurity if there were not some signature on the plant, some mark, some word, as it were, telling us that it is good for diseases of the eyes. This sign is easily legible in its seeds;: they are dark globes set in white skinlike coverings whose appearance is much like that of eyelids covering an eye._

_The Order of Things by Michel Foucault_

When I stride into the classroom I often miss my Hogwarts role that allowed me to be as much of a bastard as I wanted because I could make potions like nobody's business. This day I walk into class and wish I had the familiar black barrier of a robe to hide behind. Shanti is in the back row.

"Good afternoon students and guests," I say to her and the two other people drawn by the reputation of my parade of oddities. We are dissecting herbs and finding structures that relate to their medicinal purposes.

Using the microscope-projector thing that gives me fits with how clumsy it is, I place an herb, a cross-section of a stem, a preserved leaf before the lens. Then my instrument traces an ear shape, the outline of a dagger, or demonstrates the reaction of a certain plant to strong sunlight. Then we turn to the muggle textbooks about plant pharmacology and learn that each shape or sign does, in fact, presage a medicinal use.

It's Paracelsus' Doctrine of Signatures, of course: the outer nature of a thing indicates its inner qualities. What I show my students are common mnemonic devices such as novice potion-makers rely on. My mother used them when she taught me to read in all her old books. But the muggles' astonishment is complete, every class. I feel almost ashamed by how much they admire what I knew when I was seven, but since I am not making potions, but rather making the lessons as dry and abstract as possible, my courses are so far of no interest to the French Magical authority thus far.

So I am pleased when Shanti is not looking at me with some cheap wonder but with some other expression. When I ask for a volunteer to test the Hellenic Cupula flower, she is the first to raise her hand. The shape of the flower itself is reminiscent of the architectural structure whose name it borrows. But each individual petal is the shape of a heart, and, when concocted properly, these petals are very good for heart ailments.

They are also very Cool, a quality that I've noticed Shanti has an irregular reaction to.

Before I can prevent her she is walking to the front of the class. I take a tiny pinch of the pollen and brush it across the palm of her hand.

A few sparks fly out and she laughs. The class murmurs.

"So we have explored the medicinal properties of some 150 plants," I say to the class. "A topic upon which we have not yet touched on is how the unique human system adds a whole new set of variables."

I nod at Shanti and she sits. The rest of the lecture is about the examination they are preparing for in the coming week.

Class is dismissed. Shanti is waiting for me outside. "I'm afraid you ruined my lecture," I say, brimming with excitement at what this unusual reaction of hers might mean.

"For that I owe you a trip to the café," she says.

She leads me through the crowd of muggles in the courtyard. I still can't get used to the idea that brushing by these people is not going to infect them with my True Face. It always takes me longer to negotiate my usual touch-free transit through a crowd. This small woman has some trick that makes people get out of her way. In no time we are across and I point to the corridor with the campus coffee shop.

"What was supposed to happen?" she says as we approach the line for coffee.

"Most people are not quite so dramatic in their reaction to Cupula flowers; I would have expected you to note a feeling of calm because it tends to slow down rapid heartrate."

"So you find me dramatic? I wouldn't deny it," she tosses over her shoulder before placing her order.

"You seem to have odd reactions to what I would call 'Cold' substances," I resume when we retrieve our cups. "Remember, you felt a bit of static electricity, as you called it, with both my bird and my beetle."

"Is that bad?" she asks in such a way that indicates she has no fear of being labeled as such.

"It is very good for me because the unusual gives me a place to start. I don't know what to do with normal reactions."

She toys with her paper cup. "So if you were to ask me whether I ever drink anything but institutional coffee, such as that which we have enjoyed at the hospital and your school, what would be the appropriately abnormal reaction?"

I wrest my attention from musings about muggle Spagyrics and realize there is nothing else in my head. These days my wit only has two settings: off and eviscerate. There once was a time when it wasn't so difficult to banter. Where did I lose that part of me? This mixture of relaxation and disquiet. Where have I—

"You seem to travel very far away and back again in the space of a second," Shanti is saying.

"Sometimes I do," is my considered reply.


	51. Chapter 51

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 51: Sylphides

_"They live in the four elements: the Nymphae in the element of water, the Sylphes in that of the air, the Pigmies in the earth, and the Salamanders in fire. .. To each elemental being the element in which it lives is transparent, invisible and respirable, as the atmosphere is to ourselves."_

_Paracelsus, Philosophia Occulta, translated by Franz Hartmann_

Saturday morning I show up at the Sun Institute with a few substances known to cause a reaction in muggles, and several more as my real test compounds.

The first woman, an elderly lady with a cane, sits down painfully. "Can you help me with my rheumatism?" she asks before I can trot out my carefully composed paragraph about my background studying herbology all over the world.

"I'm not sure, madam, let me perform some tests," I say politely, trying to ignore Shanti hovering close by pretending to shelve some books.

"Could you rate each of these substances as hot, cold or indifferent, please?" I say with my most muggle-charming smile.

The woman is obviously accustomed to trying almost anything to relieve the swelling in her joints, because she gamely follows my lead, reacting to each substance that I paint in a thin stripe on her arm.

"Cold. Warm. Neutral. Neutral. Oh goodness, that's cold! Neutral. Cold."

Each of the cold and warm reactions is consistent with a normal muggle's reactions, such as my father had to the small minority of the plants he worked with. The neutrals are test compounds I had hoped might cause a reaction. But the last Cold….

"Did I do well?" she asks anxiously.

"You did extremely well." Something in my voice causes Shanti to wander over. "Would you mind terribly if I put a stripe on your forehead and your w-writing hand? It will disappear in a moment. See?"

I paint a stripe on my forehead and am thankful this is one of those substances that I have very little reaction to. Most magical people would be harmed by the greatly concentrated preparations I made specifically for the muggle system.

"Well, all right. Are you sure you don't want to put it on both my hands?" She stretches out the skewed joints as well as she can.

"Let's start with my way and then try your way, how's that?" Shanti rolls her eyes at the effect my charm is having, just as she predicted, on this old woman with rheumatism.

The spatula is a mere formality—these are patients for whom I could apply the compound with my hands, but a lifetime without touch has made me very protective of this sense. The stripe goes down her forehead and the old woman actually giggles. Shanti and I exchange a look. Then the shape is drawn on her wand—writing hand.

This last is my own innovation. My mother used to slap it on any old way, but over the years I have learned to start at the outside of the wrist and draw a jagged path that hits the root of all the fingers but the index. It is to this precision that I attribute the woman's reaction.

"Oh, oh, my goodness." The woman closes her eyes. Shanti quickly gives her a glass of water, which she grasps with her left hand so that she can keep staring at the right.

"Are you well, madam?" My courtly manners conceal terrifying images of being hauled before a muggle court.

She drinks and sets down the glass. "I just remembered the name of all of my primary school teachers, what I had to eat on my wedding day, and that I have a library book past due."

"That's wonderful; it shows your system is cleansing yourself," I improvise and try to smile away Shanti's alarm. "How is your rheumatism?"

"A little better, perhaps. Can I buy the rest of that?"

"This is my test solution, but I can prepare some for you right now," I say smoothly, pulling another small pot from my bag and tipping one of my neutral bases in with it. Stirring with a spatula with one hand while my other lights a quick invisible flame under it produces a slightly less concentrated version.

"How much do I owe you, young man?" The woman asks, a youthful flush to her cheeks.

"Ten euros," Shanti interjects. The woman's hands still seem to have trouble grasping money, but the first thing she does is smear some of the solution on both hands. "Why do I feel nothing on my left hand?" she asks. "The right feels very cool and relaxed, as if I had a handful of water."

"Alas, our bodies are not mirror images of themselves. Please use the solution sparingly and tell me how it goes."

"What was that?" Shanti hisses at me when the woman goes. "Is it safe?"

"I've never heard of a negative reaction," I say, glossing over the fact that my knowledge is limited to books and one real live muggle I knew 40 years ago. "But I've never heard of such a strong positive reaction. Usually mild cooling compounds are good for muscles and joints, but this woman experienced marked mental clarity."

And thus went all of my consultations, sometimes as many as a dozen in one day, carried out under the watchful eye of Shanti. Not everyone had a reaction like the first client's. Some people seemed especially insensitive, but even they could feel one thing hot or cold so I didn't come off as a complete charlatan.

Probably what was most productive for me was simply the proximity to these strange variant of humans. Once or twice I felt a strong reaction to the salve echoed in my own system, but it was over so quickly I couldn't properly trace it. All I could say is that it is like a magical reaction in the way that soil can sometimes conduct a small amount of electricity compared to lightning hitting a rod. It's much weaker and much more diffuse.

The people with the strongest reactions are not necessarily the ones that come back. The first woman came back raving about my technique to her skeptical friend in tow, who was singularly unreactive and altogether an unpleasant old lady who reminded me of Aunt Adele.

"A quack, I knew it," comes her acerbic voice while I'm testing the last compound.

"Perhaps, but think of how much enjoyment it has given you to find that out," I think while offering her my best smile and a wet towel to wipe off the salves.

"Did you say something?" she narrows her eyes at me.

"No, I said nothing, but I do say have a good morning," I smile at her. Only when the two elderly ladies have gone do I ask Shanti, "I didn't say anything while I was performing the test, did I?"

"No, the two of you just glared at each other like a pair of statues."

"The two of us? You mean she didn't call me a quack?"

"No." She is struggling to understand my alarm.

"It is nothing. Sometimes I pick up on people's emotions, that is all," and she goes back to her Reiki station.

From that time onward I am much more careful about what I think around people when I'm working so hard to establish a connection with them. Because if I'm just floundering around with the reactions of this new life form, there are certain things I don't want to know.

Take the apparently healthy young woman working at the institute who has not taken my subtle hints that she should see a doctor seriously. I know that if she doesn't have cancer yet she will soon, but there's no way to explain to her that she is vibrating on the same frequency of some of the gravely ill children who watch my magic tricks at the hospital. At least with her I had some idea what I am dealing with, but in a few other cases off the street I had to dispatch people with a vaguely warming or cooling placebo that would do nothing against the serious imbalance I could sense in their systems but not pinpoint.

Lessmore would say that one of the Mercies is that we can only pay attention to so many things at once, but she was a learned practitioner with a rare diagnostic sensibility born of years of experience. I know more about birds than I do about muggles. When they don't react at all I feel frustrated, but when they do, I'm even more frustrated because I don't know what it means. And if I bring ancient texts to Rukmini's bedside to try and jam some knowledge into my head, often all I have to show for it is waking up in the little invisible shield I set around myself and feeling the terror that my spell wore off in my sleep.

"Rukmini," my mental voice says to her quiet mental sea. If I were to dip into the ocean anywhere in the world, I would know just as much as I do dipping into the mental waters I know are some part of her being. Occasionally I get a flash—Shanti making a monkey face as a girl is one, but they are like a shadowy eel that slips by me in the depths, and I have no way of knowing if I put them there myself. I know there is life in the ocean, but I do not speak its language. Her mind has even less reason to reveal itself to mine.

"Rukmini, am I wasting my time? Is it wrong to manipulate these muggles in this way?"

I've told her so much about myself that I fear she must be well and truly gone. Anyone who was listening would sit up in bed and demand a demonstration of all the magic I've revealed to her.

"My genius is making things disappear into myself, not healing. It's a disability, what I am, nothing more."

And then suddenly I am talking to my mother. "I so wish you could meet Harry, mother. He takes all the things about me that are wrong and makes them right. He's my Nonesuch."

And my mother, who taught me the language of nature before she forgot it, would not make fun of my use of a potions metaphor for love. She would understand immediately the powerful balancing action of the Cimarron Nonesuch salt and what the human equivalent would be. I imagine her stroking my hair in the companionable silence that always stretched between us, where there could never be any lies.

Now that Harry and I have agreed that we are happy, and that enjoying our learning opportunities is what we're supposed to be doing in Paris, we haven't been seeing much of each other. It doesn't matter so much, although sometimes I am sad about the things I can't share. But all of my actions over the last two years have been dedicated to building a life for us, and now suddenly it seems real. We're building something together.

After my volunteer presence at the Institute has become routine, I think my refusals to socialize with the other regulars have also become routine. But one Tuesday, which I habitually dedicate to culling several dozen muggle profiles for my assistants to add to our data pile, a larger group of practitioners than normal has assembled at the end of the evening.

"Usually we meet on Thursdays, but this time we had a scheduling conflict," smiles one woman who has been introduced to me once as an Ayurveda adept.

"You must tell us all about yourself—after we discuss some of the Institute business," a young man who does something with stones says to me.

Thank goodness the chap with the snake left it home today. The additional strain of having to ignore anything the snake might say would have pushed me over the edge.

There's nothing to do but accept a cup of tea and sit myself down at the long table with a bunch of muggles who are no more interesting en masse than the magical individuals with whom I used to be condemned to suffer staff meetings.

Shanti sits across from me, and by the intent look on her face I begin to believe that my suspicions that this "scheduling conflict" was entirely fictional were correct.

The part of me that has become practiced at being bland and pleasant keeps going like clockwork, but the rest of me drifts from the agonizing meetings where I used to sneak a bit of China Cheer to keep me going, to the least painful good memory from Hogwarts—Lessmore. What would she think about all of these people? "Never trust anyone that smiles that much," she'd sniff—she was like my grandmother in that way—completely allergic to pretense. But these people, there's something else about them I can't place….

"And what do you think about that, Julian?" a woman who does cowrie shell divination asks me.

"I think that is a fine plan," I say, and can tell from the look of astonishment on Shanti's face that the "color" of the conversation was indeed favorable just before they asked my opinion.

"Then we should accept paid advertisements for the walls, if and only if the practitioner has been vetted first."

A murmur of agreement with one or two grumbles adds another layer to my boredom, and they forget about me again.

When at last it is over, I gather my things and wait for Shanti's inevitable curiosity to protect me from everyone else's. "You did this," I say, my eyes sliding over the warm brown planes of her face. "This was some sort of experiment of yours."

"Would I stoop so low, Monsieur chercheur?" She throws back her head and laughs before I can respond. Hermés! The whole shop stops when she laughs like that. "It is you who I can believe would go to any lengths to find something out. I watch you while you're experimenting on people. When you want something from someone, Julian, nothing else in the world exists."

"And when I don't?" I nod my way through the still-curious group of healers with Shanti as my shield out into the street.

"Then it's like you don't exist. Where do you go, Julian? It's so odd that no one else seems to notice, but I can clearly see you're not in the room."

"Yes, Shanti-ma, I'm mentally preparing for the lesson I would be working on, if I wasn't roped into a meeting against my will."

"Oh, nonsense. When you checked in every so often you were smiling. More so than I've ever seen you." We walk in the direction of campus and her metro station.

Oh, well, with Lessmore gone, why not? "I was thinking of a brilliant nurse I once interned with, and how she and I always saw the same things in people—much to their detriment I'm afraid—us both being outsiders in our own ways. I was considering how to describe this Institute of yours to her."

"What sort of things would this person say?"

"For instance, she told me that academics are easier to handle if you visualize them with tails."

Shanti stops in the street and looks me up and down. "I'm not an academic, madame, my experience is almost entirely in the field!"

"Hm, yes, it doesn't quite work for you." She resumes walking. "But you know what it is about that group, they're like traps, all of them—they'll let you sit there and drown in their compassion for hours and never give you a hand out. I have to limit my time with them myself, or I'll end up crying for no reason. It can be quite unhealthy if the meetings go on too long. Everyone stares into each other's eyes reflecting each other to infinity."

Source

"That's it! Sylphides. They remind me precisely of Sylphides." The aptness of the comparison makes me stop on the sidewalk this time.

"Of what?" Shanti tilts her head at the café we've ended up in front of, and my mind is too full to remember that neither Snape nor Moreau ever socialize on purpose.

"It's a, let me show you." We go in and I let her order whatever she likes, wine and something, so that I can indulge my impulse to draw out my notebook. "My sketching is terrible, but they have large, inquisitive eyes, the bird-like head on a human body. They are known to be extremely nosy but very intelligent."

While I struggle with the pencil, a memory is coalescing from my time at Hogwarts. My grandmother never taught me the language of the sirens—the spirits of the water element—but she did teach me a valuable lesson useful when communicating with nature spirits in general. You can avoid being sucked in to the deep by the sirens' songs if you speak to them first and just keep right on talking.

The day that Professor Isle called us all out to the forest to see a rare sight, I recognized the Sylphide from our illustrated textbook.

"All right, class, just remember that you have to stare it down, and then you'll be in control," the tiny professor instructed us with the secret that would help us avoid getting lost in the creature's huge eyes.

One by one, each student practiced staring the Sylphide down. Those who were very daring asked for a feather, which the beast plucked from its wings using its humanoid hands.

When it came my turn I felt nothing in particular. This was right around the time that things were turning sour between me and James and Sirius, so I was probably distracted. All I remember was that I started looking into the creature's eyes and I couldn't bear the infinite sympathy in its gaze. It was as if someone took That Look that Dumbledore and all other adults liked to train on me, and concentrated it into its most pure form—two blue pools each with a drop of jet black.

I tore my eyes away. "Stop it! Stop it! Make it stop!"

My breath was coming in ragged gasps and Professor Isle spoke harshly to me for the first and only time:

"Mr. Snape, can you not follow directions? Look what you've made me do!" And only after I hit the ground did I realize the thing was trying to take me with it as it flew away. Isle had to Stun it to get it to unhand me, and she loathed doing anything that would harm a beast.

I turn the sketch around so Shanti can see it. "This is a very poor likeness, but you see the human form with the bird's head, wings and tail."

"I know this; we call them Garudas in India." Shanti is adding to my drawing and making it look more like an actual animal until I'm staring at the magical creatures I've disliked ever since encountering them for the first time. The birds love to tease me about my aversion, but moving around with feathered folk as I do these days, running into a Sylphide or two is inevitable. At least now I can speak their language, and that seems to unnerve them enough to leave me alone.

But Shanti's excellent rendering makes me happy. I laugh, delighted to be sharing some point of reference from my life with someone.

"You have Sylphides in India?" I've never seen one in my travels in Asia. Their feathers are prized for their healing powers, I muse, considering adding India to my next itinerary.

"Well certainly, you know there's been such a cross-pollination of myth through the years that there are a few words with Sanskrit roots in English." She looks pleased to be schooling me for a change.

Of course. To her it is a myth.

A chill wind blows through me.

"Julian, Julian, where have you gone?" she says playfully. I am suddenly quite miserable in my loneliness. "You know, you are genuinely nice when you let yourself talk to people. Why don't you do it more often?"

"Whatever for?" I say wearily.

"You talk to me," she points out and hands me a piece of bread.

"There's that," I say drily. "For some reason you can't be fobbed off quite as easily as I would like." I pour her some wine and she leans forward triumphantly.

"With your bows and your flourishes with a silk scarf to distract from pulling flowers out of your sleeve? Oh yes, I know all of your quaint little tricks. I watched in the children's ward once. Leave all of that just for a moment and come into the real world—we're dying to meet the rest of you!"

"Did I ever claim that there was anything other than illusion to my illusions?" I ask, feeling infinitely disappointed that they seem like any other muggle charlatan's trick. "And I am in the real world, madame, it just may be a different version than you're prepared to accept."

The thought comes to me for the first time in this woman's presence that I've killed people, and how that makes us forever strangers. That I'm no more welcome in muggle society than I am in my own, unless I sneak in through the backdoor in this Julian costume.

"What is it? I'm sorry, my friend, I play a little too hard sometimes," Shanti's liquid dark eyes try to do that sylphide's trick she was just making fun of earlier—they are like a deep pool of tiny circumference but infinite depth, and more than one person has been lost for an aeon or two in the creatures' ready and easy compassion. "Perhaps I'm better seen with a tail as well."

The restaurant is buzzing with muggle talk—they have a different intonation to their language that perhaps only I and my Aunt Adele could hear—and their inescapable piped-in music, the clattering of dishes and the clinking of cutlery are all swarming in my ears. I suddenly feel more lonely than I have ever allowed myself to feel as an adult. This is not my home, and I can't ever be at rest in the wizard world, not ever again. Nowhere is my home but Harry, and our house is built on shifting sands, on a fragile truce between what I take from him and what he's able to keep from my unnatural system.

I'm an Alkahest. I have never had a home, not England, not France, not even the house I digested.

So for one moment I let this irritating muggle woman see the desolation that is my life. The cold wind whipping through me at all times. It takes all my strength to only let my Severus self come out of my eyes and not the rest of me. She asked for it—well, there you have it, is my feeling.

And I wait for her to flinch or start talking about something of no consequence or order more wine or anything that any person, wizard or muggle, would do to avoid having to face the bankrupt being that I am.

"Hello, Julian, it's nice to finally meet you," she says. "Stop by any time."

Mumbling an excuse I dash out of the restaurant and apparate to her cousin's side, where I suddenly need to be with all my soul.

"Tell me what's happening to me, Rukmini. I am not really unhappy!" my mind demands of the calm sea where the comatose woman's eel of a mind weaves itself between my feet. "This cousin of yours, she just has this blind urge to meddle in my business. If only she knew what you know," and the eel nudges against my shin sympathetically. "Yes, well, that's easy for you to take the open-minded view. Everything seems as though it's meant to be when underwater."

After that night my shield is reinforced by my iron resolve to avoid any additional messiness with this Shanti creature. When she returns to our old companionship while at the Sun Institute and makes no move to inquire further, my mind can concentrate on amassing as much data as possible without distractions.

My current focus is to place the reactions muggles have to various compounds within some other area of the vast Paracelsan cosmos. There are mercury and sulfur, and then ideas like the Ens or entia, as well as more general concepts such as the light of nature. Perhaps in the absence of the mumia that orders the magical system, muggles feel one of these other quantities more strongly. This leads to more experimentation in my laboratory so that I have still more test substances, and still more notes in my journals that fill up very quickly.

"Julian. You will not save the world if you do not rest," Shanti says to me one day.

"You are right. It is this project that is taking so much of my free time," I excuse myself with a decisive tone that evening, anxious to get home and compare today's readings with some theories I've been working on.

"What project? You mean you do something besides smile at old women and break my heart with the look on your face when they leave?"

She can see how moved I am by the distance between myself and these muggles? I'm going to have to be more careful about what I let this Garuda-muggle see. "Yes, it seems we are to give a concert before the dean."

"A concert? You play some sort of instrument?"

"It is an a capella concert of some very special songs I happen to know," I say stiffly, not wishing her to know how meaningful this absurd little happenstance is to me. "My students have found my little sliver of French folklore to be very amusing, and the word of our activities has unfortunately reached the ear of the deans of several schools. The science academy has never had a singer on the faculty and they are getting a lot of mileage out of this concert. I can't wait until this Friday comes and goes."

Shanti is frowning. "You were going to sing—in a concert—and not tell me about it?" She has flung on her wrap, turned off the muggle lights and gone out the door before I realize what has happened.

When I am by her side in a moment she seems surprised. "I have excellent night vision," I lie, having apparated in the dark. Though my other senses appear to be quite lacking. Why would this person care whether I sing?

"Humph!" she says, not looking at me but waiting for me to follow her down the street.

"It honestly didn't occur to me that anyone would want to go to this sure-to-be-dull affair." Something in my voice makes her slow her rapid stomp down the street. It's true—Harry refused to go on the grounds that he wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. He can't get used to the idea that I can sing, though what he thinks I'm doing with the birds all the time I couldn't guess. But even if he did have to sit there in the audience smiting himself to keep from rolling on the floor, it would mean a great deal to have him, as a partner and a wizard, at the event, and especially at the hideously awkward dinner to follow.

A mad idea strikes me between the eyes.

"Shanti-ma," I intone solemnly, "Would you do the honor of accompanying me on what will surely be the strangest night of my life?" The bow happens before I can suppress it. Damn my grandmother's deportment lessons!

"Why Julian, I would be delighted," she says, rewarding me with a burst of warmth and a curtsey. "What should I wear?"

"Whatever one wears to an evening of sharing all my mother's healing wisdom as entertainment."

It truly is one of the strangest nights of my life.


	52. Chapter 52

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 52: The Concert

One day at the beginning of the spring semester I have just started discussing the Active versus Passive concept (that is, a substance's general level of reactivity) in Theoretical Botany when a woman walks in.

Her magic tickles me. A light sky blue.

I nod at the witch and keep talking while dissecting the plant before the projector, suddenly self-conscious. Even without my special sense I'd immediately pick her out of a crowd of muggles. It's the different cut of her clothes. The sense of a great power contained. I find that among women, especially, the difference between magical and non-magical is very clear. Physical strength is not a determining factor in our world, and witches move with a greater assurance and expectation of equality than most muggle women—at least those of my generation, as this witch is.

She watches politely and I can only assume that she is from the French Magical Authority. I'm dying to know how serious of a visit this is—I've been expecting them to check out my class to see if I'm breaking any rules, but it's all available in muggle texts, just arranged as only someone with my background could. And none of them are privy to the Spagyrics of these samples, which I have spent long hours choosing as the ones that register farthest away from the magical end of the magical-natural continuum.

Then again, they could suspect that I am not merely a wizard masquerading as a muggle professor, but hiding something altogether more dangerous.

Reassuring myself that the French authorities have never bothered Severus Snape, aka the Alkahest, on his occasional potions forays in Paris to buy and sell potion wares, I focus my attention back to the lecture I'm mechanically delivering. It occurs to me to share a little jest.

"The properties of these plants have long been known in the countrysides," I say. "Their use predates widespread literacy, so these plants' medicinal qualities have been passed down through the generations in song. I myself know a few, if you forgive my voice."

I sing a song in French my mother taught me when I was very small. I used to sing it to her when feeding her when she was very weak and it never failed to bring her back a little. Here it is, with a rather clumsy attempt to keep the rhyme in English:

For all of your needs

Fill your retorts

Don't look to the weeds

But to the worts!

Lousewort,

Liverwort,

Toothwort,

Woundwort,

Lungwort.

Good for the head,

To the heel,

When red in the peel.

But beware the wort's green,

Or all mixtures too hot

With an excess of spleen

And go wrong you will not.

The class murmurs. The French love anything about France.

"Do you know 'West of the Elm, East of the Cedar?'" comes a voice from the back of the class. The Ministry Witch is speaking up.

"I'm not sure," I feign, though it was another favorite. "Does it go 'Take from the west, it's best?"

And she sings a slightly different version that has a word or two in Breton, the dialect from Brittany,

"Take from the west,

Heed my behest!

If moss is your quest

For elms, regard the nests!

For most trees, go forth

And gather from the north.

Save one tree,

In the country.

For cedars

It's neater

For bird or for beast

To cull and cut from the east."

My students are entranced.

"More, again!" they prompt.

The witch comes up to the front of the class and we sing several songs together. She knows another, "Bubble, Bubble, My Cauldron":

"Leap, little flame, stay alert now!

There's no resting till the stirring's done.

One, two, three, stir to the right now,

Four, five, six, stir to the left now,

Oh, dear me, always stir in threes,

If you know what's good,

Decoct like you should."

Together we make the stirring motions my mother made when teaching me decoctions, and that I made a few years later when trying to get food into her mouth. Everyone laughs and I teach them a few rhymes.

This exercise buys me some valuable time with my faculty now that Mick's novelty has worn off. A group of students creates a weekend excursion into the villages, looking for songs about plants. Even muggle villages have songs preserving the last scraps of traditional knowledge about plants, and they surprisingly bring back a few wizard ones without realizing it.

A few people get together and have a little evening performance that is completely bizarre to me. These are potion-making principles passed on by every wizard family with smallest remnant of knowledge about potions, or at least with enough sense to know how easy it is to for children to poison themselves. Now they're being mouthed by muggles in love with anything traditional.

Watching them make the motions, taught to wizard children as an ancestral survival wisdom, of just how to hold a Stinging Bottlefly by the tail to collect its life-saving anti-toxin liquid, I don't know how to feel. I use Bottlefly liquid in a very expensive medicament bought by mediwizards and witches practicing all over Europe.

The dean of the science faculty shocks me by showing up at this informal performance. Apparently word has gotten around that one of his faculty members is involved in something creative and he feels that it is a rare chance to achieve some artistic gravitas that is usually manufactured by the other, more accessible departments. After the round of songs my students and I are invited to give this performance in front of some bigwigs and where, I imagine, everyone will eat self-consciously rustic foods and talk about their grandmothers.

On my invitation, Shanti is in the audience giving me an inscrutable look that calms me for a change.

"Is my singing so poor that you must mock me?" I whisper, sitting at the table eating some sort of rabbit pie.

"No, it's very pleasing," she says with some surprise. "I was smiling thinking about what you were saying about your mother teaching you these things that weren't a game at all." Shanti accepted at face value my description of my mother as a folk herbalist. "My uncle used to say: 'Better a sitar player than a curry shifter.' Meaning, if you have to roll out your culture for spectacle, then offer the very best of it." I frown. "Don't be so serious, Julian. It's good to see you forget yourself. Everyone does these things. Be a good sport. The nice thing about being away from people who know you is that no one understands you well enough to know when you've humiliated yourself."

This other exile and I form an alliance that night, the way exiles have always formed alliances throughout time. Shanti raises her eyebrow at me when people imitate my mother's songs, and I am grateful that she understands what price I pay for my childhood coming to a second life on these strangers' lips.

We kick each other when one of the most important guests actually tears up talking about his grandmother's dexterity at wringing chicken's necks.

"Can you believe they actually argued about the right way to kill a chicken? 'Monsieur, I beg your pardon, but you know nothing of the fowl's anatomy, nothing!'" I'm leaning down to her ear, murmuring my re-enactment of the evening that has brought us so much enjoyment after all. It's a nice night, so I'm leading Shanti the long way through the campus to show her the buildings where I teach my other classes.

"Oh, Julian! Stop it, you are giving me a cramp!" Shanti holds her stomach while making little screams of delight.

Right in front of the fountain everything goes purple.

"I take it your little exercise in prostituting our culture went well," Harry says.

Par le Trismégiste! I've been so careful to keep my illusionist activities at the hospital from getting out!

Then the real meaning of his words strikes me.

"I hadn't realized your qualms were with singing a few songs you could never be bothered to listen to before, and not with the way such an exercise would cut into your valuable drinking time."

"I was actually working on a term paper, you know, in a second language. As I tend to do whenever I'm not sleeping."

"Oh really, I suppose your time with your friends is spent studying and not engaging in more enjoyable pastimes."

I was referring to broom-flying, primarily, but in Harry's eyes I see he takes it as something more prurient.

"Just like you spend all your time at that Institute gathering data and not going out on dates with people who could never understand you."

Whether he's referring to women or muggles, I can't tell, but the hideously belittling look he shoots at Shanti is not lost on her. I don't think she so much as understands what we're saying. The pieces of a different sense are falling slowly into place behind her face:

Only lovers fight like this.

Her face has gone carefully blank.

I didn't tell her about Harry because, well, didn't I? I thought I did. Perhaps one of the finer points of the language used for gay couples got lost along the way and she thought I meant research partner? Roommate? I'm positive I mentioned him at some point.

I must have. Unless I've never actually told anyone because Harry's always dropping by the lab or meeting me after class and people just know.

The way everyone's always known about Severus Snape, the child with the effeminate way of talking and the girlish hair, the plaything for half the school before he was the plaything of a madman who chained me by that very need for men because I'm the Alkahest, sexual predator for wizards of all ages. Who has ever not known that I love men to the point of destruction?

Plus, this whole exercise I've seen others perform, the casually dropping in the fact that they prefer men, is just distasteful for me. I refuse to declare what I do in bed simply to let some muggle have the opportunity to accept or reject me because of it. As a wizard I find any requirement to share personal tastes to be both undignified and intrusive.

Do I walk into the potions underworld and say to a new face, "I might have some Polyjuice for sale and oh, by the way, just so that we don't have any confusion, I'm meeting my male sexual partner later"? A thief, a marauder, or a hired assassin would draw back in disgust no matter what his personal practices were, and I assure you, my back-alley associates are a many and varied lot, sexually speaking and in any other way. Except it's just known, you don't speak of it! And ask only at your life's peril! Two men I knew from the magical back-alleys of Amsterdam, Giancarlo and Toby, had nearly killed several people for what they saw as interfering in their epic love affair.

Those chaps would have long since dispatched Gerard, the sleazy man from my faculty who takes such an interest in Harry's and my relationship. Though I've been nothing but cold to the man, he's always creeping up to me with his patently mercenary friendliness, fueled by this odd conviction that he has some right to know exactly what Harry and I get up to in bed. It's fascinating to watch him find new ways to ask, using some sort of code that I hope never to learn, where our tastes lie. And when he gives up on that line of questioning, he becomes desperate to learn who does the cooking and how we divide household chores. I watch this pathology, amazed that one of Harry's "alternative sexuality" muggles is intent on turning two men, and all their possible resulting heavens and hells, into some tawdry binary whose imagining I'm positive gives him hours of autoerotic enjoyment.

With these people who feel they have a right to your intimacy, where does it end?

It's not like Shanti and I have talked about anything personal, really. I don't know if she has a partner. No more than I know if Andre has a partner. Perhaps it's shameful, but I've thought of every person I've met since getting back with Harry as a means to an end—if they can help me piece together this puzzle of how to keep us together without harming him, they come into a provisional existence for me. Otherwise, I have too many things going on to keep track of who knows who I love.

Or that someone might have more than a collegial interest in me. Shanti's neutral expression couldn't mean anything else, I see now.

Hermès, do I have to figure out what muggles think on top of everything else?

This all occurs to me in a fraction of a second before I say, "Shanti, please meet Harry, my partner." And so there is no confusion, I take his hand and force myself to hold it, though hanging on to that bit of flesh, which is as cold steel, is about as inviting as gripping the business end of a battle axe.

"Charmed," Harry murmurs like a hex. His green eyes stare down her brown ones.

"Very nice to meet you," she says politely. "It was a lovely concert, Julian. I'll see you next Tuesday at the Institute." And then she is just a small woman walking across campus.

"You see what you did? That woman is the reason my research team has data to work with. I don't see you often enough to fill out a decent Classification form."

"Oh, and I've missed so much being put under your microscope at all times, too, darling. I wonder why I prefer being around people who treat me like a person and not an experiment or a problem to be solved." He apparates to his apartment and I'm close enough behind he can't ward me out.

"This 'problem' is real enough to make you prefer, and I quote, 'mucking around drinking with my mates, because a hangover is better than the way I feel after shagging you all night.'" Do you know how much sleep I've gotten since we've come here because I'm constantly working and worrying about it?"

"If you haven't gotten any sleep, then don't try and blame it on work, Severus. You were having a grand time with that, that woman." The way he makes the word sound like an incurable condition makes me seethe. "How could you Severus, with a woman? You obviously didn't tell her about me for a reason."

"I am not in the habit of denigrating entire genders, monsieur paragon of tolerance." The gibe hits home but he shrugs it off. "She was the handiest person to bring along to the event you told me you couldn't possibly attend because you were afraid you'd be laughing too hard. And she's a friend, by the way. A colleague and a friend, not someone I would discuss intimate matters with. She practices Reiki—"

"I don't care what she practices, lover, as long as she practices on someone else."

"Do you have any idea how lonely it is for me—someone literally steeped in magic—to be surrounded by these muggles every day, trying to make some sense out of their completely foreign systems? I spend most of my time trying to reach her cousin, another woman—" I grin at his mistaken jealousy —"who is so far immune to my charms as she is in a coma. And I have just as much success communicating with her as I do with the rest of the muggle world. I'm dealing with the discomfiting thought that they're a different species in some way, which makes no sense for half-bloods like you and me. It's like trying to write with my feet or breathe water without gills, and I have done it all for—"

"Oh, don't even try it, Severus, don't think I'm going to let you get away with that, 'I did it all for you,' nonsense. You love every second you spend working on your precious science. I actually am a little jealous of Mick, more so now that I know he's a mold—you don't take half as good care of me as you do of it. You could forget about me for days at a time, I've seen you disappear for hours with me right in front of you with your books more engrossing than anything I have to offer you."

"Do you pretend that you haven't been using your 'talents' to impress the very appreciative Tristan? Does he call you The Boy Who Lived at the crucial moment?"

Harry stops short. "Tristan? What moment?"

"When you enjoy him, idiot boy, when he screams your name while you possess him." I hadn't realized how clearly I'd envisioned it until this little pocket of bile emptied itself.

He laughs and gets stuck that way, laughing until I smite him out of it. "Tristan? Tristan is straight, Severus. Straight as my wand."

"Come now, the two of you are so into each other you seem to disappear entirely when you're with him. 'Oh, Tristan, I love your art. Oh, Tristan, you ride your broom so well.'"

Harry is staring at me with some unfathomable surprise.

"You actually thought I had time to carry on a love affair right under your nose? That I would invite you every week to go out with some bloke I was getting it on with?"

"You seem to think I have time for this massive muggle love affair," I shoot back.

He sinks to the floor and buries his head in his hands. "Because geniuses can't ever ask before developing these intricate paranoid realities."

"Harry, you can hardly blame me for feeling upset by how excited you are to spend time with your friends and how you characterize intimacy with me as a waste of energy."

"Severus, why do I keep thinking you understand me? Why does it hurt so much when you insist upon seeing the worst in me?" He bangs his head against the couch cushions a few times. "I thought you understood how much it means to me to have real friends again, instead of people I pretend everything is all right with. That I'm actually interested enough to socialize on the rare occasions when I'm not studying harder than I ever have in my life. This is after years of scarcely being able to talk about the weather with old friends." The hurt in his voice is real, and it cuts through the last threads of my remaining resentment like a knife.

"Because my only genius is being a complete disappointment as a human being," I say, burying my face in his lap and feeling the purple of my only home on this earth enveloping me again. "I'm sorry, Harry, you're right, when I'm focused on something nothing else exists for me."

"I guess I wasn't very open to this concert thing. I should have realized how important it was to you." He rubs my back. "What was it like, singing your mother's songs?"

A flood of associations comes to me from the moment that I was considering all the rituals expected of me, of us, as two men together in this society.

"Have you ever heard of Toby and Giancarlo?"

"No," Harry's hand stops and his eyes narrow, scrutinizing me for signs that these are old lovers. His jealousy, unlike mine, is not a topic to be discussed.

"They're two low-lifes I met in Amsterdam a few times. I was thinking of them earlier in the context of Gerard trying to learn all our secrets."

"Gerard? That guy is a creep. What did he say to you now?"

"Nothing any more intrusive than usual. But I happened to think of him behaving like that around this certain male couple I knew, that everyone knew, loved each other to distraction, though I never saw them closer than two feet away from one another in the ten or more years I knew them. Make yourself comfortable my love, you'll enjoy this story."

Grumbling about the usual tenor of my stories, Harry lays his head in my lap.

"Giancarlo owned a wizard bar in Amsterdam, no, not that kind of bar. It's the sort of place where I sell some of my more lucrative and questionable potions, and where I can buy the more illegal ingredients to make such compounds. He was a big, oxlike man with only one facial expression: the menace required to successfully run an establishment that caters to some of the most unscrupulous people on earth."

"And he and Toby were together?" Harry yawns.

"Toby had two very special qualities: he was quite possibly the most charming wizard you will ever meet," Harry's eyes narrow, "and definitely the worst criminal in the history of criminal behavior. It was a sort of mania of his: he had to be doing something illegal at all times, the way compulsive gamblers can't help but lay bets no matter what the consequences, and he gave Giancarlo a terrible time trying to keep him out of fixes. Not that the big man was a saint, by any means, but he ran his side businesses as soberly as legal enterprises, though they were, to a one, on the wrong side of the law."

"So? Did people have a problem with them or something?"

"The law certainly did! Toby was constantly getting pinched for some ridiculous escapade or other, and if the other man couldn't bribe, intimidate, hex or harm the auror into releasing his mate, Giancarlo was known to make the supreme sacrifice of getting pinched himself just so they could be together."

"Really? To Azkaban? On purpose?" Now I have Harry's attention.

"Toby has probably been a guest there, and most of the other similar establishments across Europe. On more than one occasion guards are suspected of breaking them out because Giancarlo was a kind of folk hero and Toby his own worst enemy and nothing more. I myself helped create an untraceable Polyjuice potion just to help Giancarlo steal into one of these prisons and steal out with the always-repentant Toby. Prisons are warded to detect your garden-variety Polyjuice for just this reason."

Harry nods, focused on the story. "So they really loved each other."

I snort. "The word 'love' would quail before such a romance. You know that picture you drew of me, the one where I'm looking at you like I'm throwing a bolt of magic with my eyes? That's how they looked at each other, and only a blind man or a fool would insert himself between that kind of passion and expect to live to tell the tale. Actually, I saw someone be so foolish once. Nearly lost an ear."

"They cut off his ear? For hassling them or something?"

"On the contrary, it was a very flattering, if stupidly forward gesture. You see, Toby was in trouble again and there was a considerable price on his head this time. It would have made much more sense for him to leave the country, but Giancarlo had some business to resolve, and the two couldn't bear to be apart. So they paid me to create another special, untraceable, un-flickerable transfiguration potion, this time taking it so far as to turn Toby into a woman."

It was actually based upon the idea of the Magical Twin that Lilly proved to be not a myth years ago. I don't know if I could ever replicate my success with Toby, but I did hit upon a female version of him that he didn't wear like a suit, the way Polyjuice usually looks.

"And no one but I would have suspected that this very fetching witch who had started hanging around the bar after Toby was supposedly on the run was actually the man himself. The two never looked at each other. Never spoke. Giancarlo was not known to have ever given two glances to a woman, or a man other than Toby, so this seemed natural. But their connection stretched like a razor wire wherever they were, and most wizards care enough about their lives to have learned to sense such things. No one had exchanged more than a word with this woman, not sure what she wanted with that seedy low-life hangout, but certain that they didn't want any part of it.

"One wizard was either too drunk, stupid or smitten with this strange lady to take no for an answer. When this idiot uttered an impropriety that no man would countenance about his lover in any form, Giancarlo's wand was out, and before anyone could stop him the fury shot out and sliced the chap's ear off."

"This sounds like one of your grandmother's stories. Come to bed," Harry complains.

"This isn't a fairy tale. It's a true story. I was the one who reattached the ear."

"You can do things like that?" Harry gives me the worried look he tends to give me when he finds out something new about me.

"It was slightly crooked, but the man in question was not inclined to go to ministry-run hospital. I was probably the only person in the bar who knew anything about medicine, and definitely the only sober person. It didn't fall off again or anything," I say defensively. "Everything ended well, with the man buying everyone a round of drinks and saying, 'In a dive like this, I should know better than to sit in a chair without casting a reveal spell on it. My fault, mate." Not that my potion could be reversed by any of the common or uncommon reveal charms."

"Naturally," Harry says, stroking my back.

"But if Toby's criminal activities gave Giancarlo no rest, they did give reason for the couple to be immortalized in a ballad by a wizard troubadour. Have you never heard the ballad of Giancarlo and Toby?"

"No. People really sang about them?"

"They still do. I'm surprised you've not heard it, but then you prefer all that loud muggle music. It's a very romantic song. Once after Giancarlo had saved the other man's skin from some especially stupid episode or other, Toby arranged to have a troubadour come to the bar and surprise his lover by singing their song. Except he hadn't counted on what effect it would have on Giancarlo to see another man singing of Toby's many charms. I wasn't there that day, but legend has it that it was the one and only time anyone has ever seen the two men touch in public.

"Giancarlo emerged from behind the bar, everyone thought because he was drawn by the singer's lovely voice. Only Toby could smell murder in the air. Toby jumped to push Giancarlo off balance so he wouldn't hurt the musician who was singing their song so beautifully that there wasn't a dry eye in the place. When the two were on the ground and Toby whispered in Giancarlo's ear that he had arranged the whole thing as a way of thanking him for saving his life yet again, they say Giancarlo shed a tear and kissed him.

"Then remembering where he was, he leapt to his feet and roared, "What are all you brigands gawping at?" And he banished them all with a movement of his wand that sealed up the door behind the last of them. And no one would dare say what went on, but they do know that it took three days for them to do it."

"That's the best story yet, Severus. Much better than the ones you gave me for Christmas, which were more… ghoulish. Whatever happened to these two chaps?"

"I don't know. Supposedly they started over in the Far East somewhere after one of Toby's more serious scrapes with the law. Why?"

"I want to meet them. They sound like us."

"I fail to see how either of us would benefit from that comparison. Which of us is the bumbler and which the bull-necked tyrant?"

"You know what I mean," Harry's strong arms encircle my waist. "We can hold our own. We look out for each other, and everyone's against us mostly. We're very dramatic, don't you think?" He rubs his cheek against mine. "Someone should write a ballad about us."

"I don't think I want us to have enough trials and conflicts to warrant a ballad, Harry. Besides, nothing rhymes with Severus."

"Well, nothing rhymes with Giancarlo either."

"The composer found a way around it."

And we end up having our own little private concert that evening. Not of my mother's songs, but of the ballad of Giancarlo and Toby.

"That was beautiful, Severus," Harry kisses me shyly after I'm done. And he repeats the refrain in a voice that could benefit from a bird tutor,

"And Gian- Gian- Gian-

Carlooo

Follooows

His love again."

"I don't think we could divide up your name like that. What if we use one of your other names? Jacques is promising."

There was a reason why I took this tour down memory lane. "So now you see that perhaps it is a generational thing, and all wizards my age or older are inclined to be rather nervous about disclosing personal matters but no less passionate for it," I say and begin to prove my point.

Harry stops me. "You know what we should do? We should make a collection of stories like the one about Giancarlo and Toby. That would have meant everything to us coming up, if we'd known a little more about other wizards like us."

My mouth opens but nothing comes out.

"Severus?"

My usual objections are stuck in my throat. "That's a splendid idea," I finally say and tackle Harry with a rare rush of enthusiasm. "How do you do it, Harry? There's always a wonderful idea just around the corner with you."

From where I have him pinned on the ground, Harry confesses, "I don't know why I didn't want to think about you knowing how to sing. Every time I find out something new about you I worry it's the part that doesn't care about me."

"The day we know everything about each other is the day tedium sets in," I say, touching him in the way that is the opposite of tedium.

Thus, we engage in another one of our gorgeously futile exercises in trying to know each other completely.

And only after we make love, after he makes some order I can live with out of the jumble of bones and powers and flaws that is me, only after he is drowsing in my arms does it occur to me that he wasn't the one who made the comment about my self-serving focus on people.

In the days following our argument, Harry and I were intimate much more often than we would usually think safe. When we saw each other again two days later, our affections were fervent enough that Harry woke up in the middle of the night with a nosebleed and fell when going to the lavatory to deal with the blood—he says because he wasn't wearing his glasses in the dark, but ordinarily he would have been able to summon his wand, then turn on the light and find the glasses. He must have no magic at all left in his system at the moment.

To distract myself from this brutal proof of how thoroughly I merged with my lover, spilled all down the front of his pajamas, I think:

They only write ballads about people fighting outside obstacles that threaten their love. What I'm doing to Harry doesn't bear thinking about, much less singing.

Harry's question about Giancarlo and Toby had roused my curiosity about these two men I hadn't thought of in years, however, so I started asking around. It didn't take too many questions to find out that Giancarlo had gotten killed in some senseless bar fight at his new establishment in Bangkok, and Toby turned his wand on himself out of grief.


	53. Chapter 53

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 53: The Dark Sea

Science faculty administrators are by now beside themselves with the success of my classes, so there is no more pressure to produce results in the research. But slowly, slowly, the samples I've been making with the patients at the center have been creating vague patterns. As Harry suspected, they are three-dimensional graphs that can be inferred by the movement of his divination readings, which consistently show that one black spot that is most likely his gall bladder ailment standing out from a generally healthy body. But that leaves the countless other variables that make up the complex creature that is Harry, and the ways in which his little universe relates to all the muggle samples.

We've had countless discussions about it, Harry and Dumbledore and I, and To'an's comments on the limitations of our magical medical theory have been bouncing around in my brain all these months. My going theory is that there are indeed two levels of activity for any given person: the microcosm and the macrocosm. Limiting the focus to the magical person for now, imagine the individual's magical signature as the correctly assembled qualities that that person possesses—both his gifts and his physical characteristics, all assembled for ultimate efficiency and health.

This optimal state is, of course, scarcely ever attained because of a variety of factors, including humanity's tendency to go out of balance, and the fact that the changing environment means the first layer must constantly accommodate a multitude of new influences.

This core I think of as similar to the nucleus of an atom as conceived my muggle science. Just as sodium is an 11 and Cadmium is a 48, each person can be boiled down to an essence of himself, which is the magical signature. Also like at atom, things are happening in this individual core—in my theory, a person's qualities are constantly assembling and reassembling while rotating, as Harry's slice of himself reflected by divination shows.

How this relates to muggles, I have no idea because I can't sense them very well, but one thing we can agree is that any person is a subject of his or her environment.

If I knew anything about all the Other Worlds, as Dumbledore and most very wise wizards call them, I would be able to better populate this part of my little cosmos. But as it is, I know almost nothing. My ability to sense weather patterns is almost useless because I can't quantify or draw the sensations at all. It is Anouk who helps me out of this quandary.

"How am I supposed to include the larger world in my calculations if I can't begin to describe it?" I was complaining to her one late night, surrounded by books and fruitless notes.

"But we talk about it all the time, you and me, when we speak about bird gossip," she pointed out. "What do you think the Seven Winds, and the different Epochs and Aeons are, if not some of the biggest forces on the planet?"

After a moment she says, "Close your beak or you'll get flies in it." Because I've been sitting there for a few minutes with my mouth open.

"You're absolutely right, my friend. Let me make you some toast." While I carefully toast the bread until it is almost burned and then scrape off some crumbs onto a dish, just the way she likes it, my mind is racing. Why did I never think to turn my conversations in the bird world, which are a source of pleasure and general news, into a tool for advancing my work?

After Anouk is done with her snack, we have a rapid-fire conversation about the best way to reflect the birds' natural awareness of planetary trends. I try giving her a piece of paper and some inks to track around with her feet, but that is messy and doesn't feel natural to her. The set of divination stones Harry gave me are too heavy for such a small creature to move around easily, but she likes the idea of something she can handle with her blue beak. Since Harry's stones mean nothing to either of us, there's nothing to be lost by using whatever is handy and the appropriate size.

She flies around the apartment and we hit upon buttons: light and multicolored, she can easily push them around, and so, after my light and dark shirts have had their buttons ripped off, we experiment with creating a diagram of what her special bird senses know about the earth.

Anouk and I wear ourselves out debating how many pieces should be used and how many colors (black and white are the most common among my shirts, but I also have several blues and some beige), and finally it is dawn. While I lay down for an hour of sleep, I assume Anouk will do the same on her perch. When I wake up with just enough time to plait my hair, shower, dress and transfigure for the day, Anouk is gone. This isn't unusual; I've engineered a little door for her to enter and exit through when I don't need her in the lab.

Throughout the day a vague excitement underlies everything I do. Passing a few sparrows when I walk across campus reminds me of this omnipresent species whose different brain structure I've scarcely scratched the surface of.

A stop by a notions shop is accomplished during my free hour. When I can finally return to the apartment that night, Anouk is indeed home, looking rather exhausted.

"Are you unwell?" The climate is so different here I've worried that she would eventually be affected by it.

"Be quiet and listen to what I've learned from the dimwits in the neighborhood." Coming from a completely natural environment like Borneo, she would naturally be more in tune to the winds and other things that shaped her life, and she's often been surprised by how much city birds have shaped their existences around humans. "But everyone agreed on some basic things."

She explains what a very thorough sampling of birds can agree upon about the world's humors and makes fun of me for taking notes. Anouk soon leaves me for her perch and a much-needed rest, but before she goes to sleep I get her attention.

"My friend, do you realize you are doing what perhaps no one of your kind has ever done? You're systematizing all the great knowledge of the bird kingdom."

"Don't go on so, it's just gossip, Lout," she grumbles. Birds tend to dislike being showered with praise.

I spend a few hours coming up with a system that uses all seven colors of buttons for the seven winds, but otherwise relies upon four colors like Harry's stones. Then, feeling oddly relaxed, I sleep very well.

When I wake up, Anouk and I share some toast as two beings getting ready for a day of work. And that day, like every day afterwards, she takes polls in the area and brings back her knowledge to leave me a diagram. This gets her out and about more than she has been since I brought her to Europe, so more and more often now I come home to find only the diagram because she is visiting with friends.

When I see Harry at his apartment a few days later after several days' absence, naturally we are taking off each other's clothes before we have a chance to catch up.

He frowns as he takes off my shirt. "Why is your shirt stuck together with this glue?"

"Oh, I haven't had a chance to take my shirts to the tailor since Anouk and I began our divination system."

"Who's this Anouk and why did he rip the buttons of your shirt?" Harry's face is livid.

"You know who Anouk is! The bird you've seen a hundred times!"

"You were doing divination with a bird?" he asks, still suspicious.

"It's a fascinating step forward for my research," I have a chance to begin before my mouth is possessed to prevent me going on about something dull, as I hoped it would.

When we are lying in bed, Harry is uncharacteristically silent and staring at the ceiling.

"Do you want to come over and see Anouk make a diagram? It really is a marvel," I offer, concerned that he's brooding about my missing buttons again.

"All right. I want to see if this charm will put your buttons back on your shirts."

And because he is a genius, it does. And then, because he loves me, he listens to me blather on about the bird kingdom and the macrocosm and all sorts of things he couldn't care less about.

"I have a test to study for, love. Don't stay up too late playing science with your bird."

But of course I do. It's only a matter of time now, I feel, for my data to start taking shape in the science faculty. So far, the information from the Sun Institute and the divination throws from Harry are two distinct sets. This is not only frustrating, but unsettling: could muggles and wizards really be so far apart?

For Shanti, as for others in my past, finding out about one aspect of my true self has made her think she's discovered all of the keys to my nature. She is relaxed and friendly now that my distance and formality seem a cover for a sexuality I seem to be too old-fashioned to admit to. She thinks it is another quaint detail for me to be so protective of the fact that I am gay in modern Paris. As if Harry's and my relationship, my own strangeness, could ever be packed into that small syllable.

If this woman feels content because I hold no more mysteries for her, I'm no closer to categorizing this energy I sense from her and it nags at me. I try again and again to "hear" what she's doing with her clients, but it's like the Vietnamese sage with his tiny organisms revealed with smoke—it's an atrophied sense I can't seem to harness.

But there's something different about this muggle. Shanti is easily the most popular healer at the institute, as I hear she is at her other part-time jobs at different venues throughout the city. I can definitely sense the difference between her clients' systems before and after she works on them.

She laughs at me, her new relaxed laugh, when I bring half a dozen new samples with me every time I see her. "Should I be concerned?" she mocks my furrowed brow as I paint stripe after stripe on her arm. "You seem to think I need a remedy for something. Am I sick?"

"Certainly not," I say without conviction. The woman's skin practically scalds me from several feet away. I test her with my science for malaria, consumption, thyroid disease, hormonal imbalances, liver ailments, an enlarged spleen, and several blood cancers. At my insistence she gets a checkup from a muggle doctor, and her clean bill of health relieves and confuses me. Why do I need to know what is wrong with her? Perhaps she's an outlier in the muggle world as I am in mine, and her ability to heal has something to do with her system being different. If it's genetic, her cousin displays no such difference, however.

We talk about it every visit.

"Rukmini, I must know. Did she have an unusual childhood in any way? Notable illnesses? Traumas other than losing her parents?" I demand of the comatose woman, whose mind is slowly becoming a little clearer to me. An echo of their childhood together floats lazily across the water towards me—a restless, chimerical Shanti for whom the sedentary life of school was a torment—but I still have no faith that this woman Rukmini is still attached to her body in any meaningful sense. Instead, the two continents—the one of earth that is her body, and the one of water which is her mind, seem to drift farther apart each day.

"Remember that there is someone waiting for you on this side of dreams," I say at the end of every visit, as I wish I had known to do to my mother.

Now that our friendship can be defined as everything that Harry's and my relationship is not, Shanti and I get along very well in the Institute. I am grateful that at least one thing in my life has been classified and filed where it ought to be. My argument with Harry showed me that while my contract has been renewed for next year by all the departments where I teach, and by the faculty where I research, in the only way that matters I'm still at square one. Harry and I must ration our contact or he, and he alone pays the price. Out of desperation I start spending much more time in the medical research laboratories late at night, looking for answers that my own science has stubbornly withheld.

There are, no doubt, more straightforward ways of learning how to use these state-of-the-art machines, but what else is a nighttime interloper to do but use his existing knowledge to get a feel for the contraptions? These inventions have fascinated me since I learned of their existence when I was planning my entrance into the muggle scientific world. What would the Great Physick himself have said about being able to look inside people and see their inner workings?

The romance of modern medical imaging wore off quickly in my first enthusiastic visits last semester, after which I gave up in favor of other projects. But now these machines seem like a great untapped promise.

It takes me weeks to learn how to turn the damn thing on, but the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) machine has been the focus of my curiosity since I realized what it does, compared to the MRI, the CAT scan gizmo, and a few other expensive baubles heavily guarded within the medical science department's vault.

If there is an anatomical difference between a normal magical being like Harry and an aberration such as me, I've come to the conclusion that it is unlikely to show up in most physiological tests. However, he and I consistently test differently than muggles in some areas—our high red blood cell count drives the campus doctor to distraction, and I've instructed Harry to refuse any test that will reveal how much electricity is in our bodies. Neither of us needs to arouse suspicion with off-the-charts results, as he did on our one trip to the muggle hospital.

But on that occasion when he was nearly dead last summer, his CAT scan and other physical measurements were fine. So I have spent some time trying to understand the logic in those machines designed to reflect structural abnormalities. But the PET scan, which seems to give some sort of window into the activity of life itself (or so it seems to my completely unschooled eye)—this is very exciting to me indeed, Harry or no Harry. From what I understand, this particular PET machine at the university is a prototype—one that allows for cross-sections to be assembled quickly and accurately on the monitor, so that it is like looking at a full-body reflection of the person's bodily processes, in addition to the ability to hone in on one or another system in its entirety.

Harry and I have reached a surprisingly comfortable detente: we work side-by-side and then usually retire to our respective apartments. He's applying himself so intently to his schooling that I can't bear to make him sick, and by not making him sick I don't treat him as if he's sick—which apparently he's come to resent more than I knew. Instead, our rare encounters are anticipated in fine detail days in advance, and in the meantime we have the benefit of the peaceful company of the only other person in the world who understands the pressures we face.

My true Snapish personality is given free rein when I'm alone with the machinery, however.

"Obey, damn you!" I silently rage on more than one of my visits to the gleaming contraption that always seems uncomfortably like a guillotine as I stick my head in it. Occasionally my frustration has caused a power surge that has set off alarms, so I try my best to keep myself in check while my magical mind probes the inert instrument's structure.

It's not that I can't get the smarmy bastard, as I refer to it, to do anything. Lights flash, motors whirr. Making any reading at all appear—that's the difficult part. It takes me a long time after finally getting the thing to "wake up," interact with my body, and create an image, for me to understand—

The machine is working just fine. It's me that isn't.

On this night I happen to tuck Anouk in my jacket pocket and then Petrify a rat—with an apology—on the way in. It's so difficult to calibrate the equipment while lying on that little slab, that I get the idea a nice frozen animal as a subject might help me concentrate on the what I'm doing.

That night I leave exams ungraded. I give only a thought to Harry's worrying about me.

I spend hours until morning, looking at my difference which I can finally see face to abnormal face.

The PET scan has been working all along and showing me my insides—It's just that I am almost completely dark. The black hole that I have always feared myself to be—seeing it at last feels too right for me to look away.

No amount of contrast agents or mental and physical activity before the test seems to make a difference. My body is probably more full of life than most people's—Harry and I both have the strong cardiovascular system common to magical folk, and as I've said, our electrical readings are much higher than a muggle's.

But the rat and the bird I've brought in: they are a seething kaleidoscope of light.

And I am the deepest dark sea.

Just before the building is due to come to life, I send the machine back to its metallic slumber and eliminate all traces of this night when I have finally seen my reflection.

Mira mi Cara Verdadera. The other Alkahest's words start to bounce around in my empty being. The paradox of nothing telling something to look at it.

Mírame. Mírame. Mírame Mírame. Mírame. Mírame Mírame. Mírame. Mírame Mírame. Mírame. Mírame. Mírame. Mírame. Mírame Mírame. Mírame. Mírame. Míram—

"Harry," I whisper softly, but his body begins reacting to the cipher that is my body even before I speak.

"Severus? What is it? What's the matter?" I'm looking at him as if through a very sweet syrup. He can sense how I'm feeling even before he puts on his glasses. "Stop looking at me like that. Have they found out who you are? Are they coming for us?" His wand is in his hand while he feels for his spectacles with the other.

The book with the normal scans is brought back to its normal size on the bed. "Are you familiar with these? A PET scan shows a window into the functioning of the body or the brain."

"Ugh, you woke me up at 5 in the morning for a science lesson?" I feel Harry's body go off red alert, and the part of me that never stops gnawing on the bone of knowledge wonders what it would be like to PET test him at various points within a spell.

"Severus? What's happened to you? You don't seem yourself." He gives me the old once-over for signs of madness and I sit there meekly until he is done.

"I finally know what it is to be myself." My scans are now in his hands. "Look, don't you see the difference?"

"So? You don't know how to use the damn machine. If you don't mind, I'm going back to bed."

"These are Anouk, my bird. And a rat that I volunteered as a participant." The mosaic of colors are clearly different than a human's, but something about it resonates as "life" on an instinctual level.

I can see them resonating with Harry.

He looks at the murky printouts of me again.

"No. It's not possible."

My limpid gaze makes him angry.

"You're not dead that I've noticed, Severus! This isn't right. Do it again or something and wake me when you've found yourself where you already are."

"My wand-hand," I point to the only faint glow of color, a dull red on the right side. "A perfect line where I tried to cut off my arm," a near-blackness on my left arm, with a tiny hint of color on the left hand.

Fascinated despite himself, Harry traces over the faint blotches that are me, gradually coming to terms that he is holding his monster-lover's life-image in his hands.

Carefully, he places the printouts on the nightstand and takes me in his arms. I don't resist. How can nothing have an opinion? "Don't go mad, love, stay here with me," he whispers over and over as I shiver for an hour or so until I wrap my nothingness around me like a great cloak and stand up.

"I'll skip class. Don't do anything foolish, Severus. You don't even know how to work this thing." Harry is searching for a way to halt the desperate processes that only he—not the most advanced muggle technology—can sense in me.

I'm staring at him as my one barrier against the void and he takes off his glasses rather than face my eyes. "Do the test on me and we'll see if you can even get the same reading twice," he says, his face looking more relaxed gazing at my blurry face again. "If we hurry we can get breakfast before you go to your lecture. If you feel up to it."

"Of course I feel up to it," comes my attempt to evoke my normal irritability. The result sounds hideously hollow, even to me.

My transfigured form has never slipped so easily over my skin. Harry seems more comfortable with this muggle face this morning as well, and I don't reproach him for keeping his glasses in his pocket while we hastily eat a croissant together. "Tonight," he whispers into my ear and we automatically smile the way we normally would with the promise of seeing each other.

This smile never fully goes away that day. I'm afraid if I let it go I won't be able to conjure another one properly, and not being able to look in a mirror would mean going around with some kind of awful grimace while thinking it was this normal muggle calling-card of a gesture.

My lecture goes fine. Dying Languages takes enough mental effort that I can just manage to forget at points the dark malleable substance that is me, contorting itself effortlessly into each obscure tongue. A couple of students stay after class—the linguistics majors have given up understanding how the great overgrown plucked parrot that stands before them can possibly speak so many languages, and use the few minutes to ask me questions to help them with other classes. They find me polite and helpful, as always. If anything, they seem more likely to linger and I have to excuse myself to meet my team of research assistants for our weekly review.

They seem excited about the strides we are making with my muggle samples, and they are finally making some associations between this set of data and the information they have been patiently amassing about natural samples that are hot or cold, active or passive. The magical colors, however, remain elusive, and normally I would have a tiny undercurrent of irritation that this quality that practically knocks me down does not, as yet, show up in the statistics.

"This is excellent," "Oh, that is too bad. Well, let me bring a new set of materials for you to compare," I say in identical tones to both the good and bad news. When one of the students studies me for a moment, I pull out the smile and wave it in the air like one of my silk scarves at the hospital. She smiles back, a smile of sympathy or collusion or some such thing that drops into my dark matter and shines for only a moment before being swallowed up forever.

Harry calls and asks to speak to one of my assistants on the grounds that he's looking for a new restaurant, but I know exactly what he's doing.

"That one, he is so funny!" Marcelle chuckles. "You should hold on to him."

"I am," I say, smile firmly in place. Everyone is always telling me to hold on to Harry, and it's always annoyed me until today. As if they were saying his will to stay with me needed a supplement or something.

Today, my childhood fears of being invisible are back to the fore, and I have to keep smiting myself in the pocket of my blazer to remind myself that nothing can feel something. I catch myself just before walking into a wall. I'm holding on for dear life to the purple light somewhere on campus that is the only thing keeping me from choking on nothingness.

That evening I spirit Harry in to the laboratory just as soon as the wing is deserted. He's doing his best impression of a man who is indulging his lover, and I'm still wearing the same stale smile from that morning.

"Severus, you're a genius," Harry breathes when the machine finally whirs to life. Now all curiosity, he submits to two rounds, one with contrast and one without, rewarding me with a randy little smile when the warming radioactive agent chases under his skin.

In short order we are looking at Harry's inner landscape, which is as beautiful and miraculous as anyone's smattering of life.

Anyone's except mine.

"Do yourself again, now that you've had a human to practice on," Harry says, pushing me down on the table. He watches my combination of hand-magic, dial adjustments and oaths that I've arrived on as a way to operate the thing. Then he cackles. "You see, you had it set up wrong or something last night, you nutter! There you are! Severus Snape, meet Severus bloody Snape."

I look up at the screen and my entire body relaxes to see a swarm of colors. "I am alive," I say with a little laugh. It's strange, though. Most people's reading shows a clear concentration of activity on the left side on the site of the heart. In my case, all of the activity is at the center, and the rest of my body is much paler than Harry's—or any other scan I've seen for that matter…

"So, print it out and let's have a little fun with this radioactive stuff. I'm hot as hell," Harry's hand caresses my side.

The monitor explodes with color at that spot.

"No," Harry breathes.

"Yes." Mirame.

"No!" I can feel Harry's indignation that this is really all there is to our love.

In a moment I've pushed Harry into my place on the table.

The new scan of him shows a dark spot where my hand just was.

"It's not what it looks like, love, we'll figure this out," Harry whispers, unable to take his eyes away from the dark lacunae that appear wherever I touch him.

Then making use of the stimulating effects of the radioactive isotope, we engage in the single most miserable intimate act of our lives.

By turns, we go through the scanner.

The results are catastrophic.

Mirame.

It's somehow much worse seeing the energy transfer in exquisite detail with muggle instruments than it was to watch it with the trident. The way everything is worse in the muggle world.

Mira mi cara…

Verdadera.

Harry watches me silently while I retch into a trash bin. He is the one who makes sure everything is back in place. He is the one who wraps his arms around me to apparate us back to my apartment. He is the one who makes me help him with writing a paper he could certainly write with only a few glances at a dictionary, as a way of keeping my mind on something neutral.

He is the one who lets me retreat to the far end of the bed because I can't bear to think of what even the most casual touch looks like in reality.

He is the one who finally falls asleep, giving me enough time to write the following letter before running off to the hospital to pour my heart out to my mother via the muggle stand-in for her who I thankfully cannot harm.

Par la Rose-Croix, what did my mother's system look like when I got finished with her?

With that fresh horror in my mind, I thoughtlessly dash this note:

_Harry, my true love,_

_You are many wonderful things to me, not the least of which are optimism and clear-headedness, two of the many qualities I lack. Nevertheless, I have often set these parts of you against each other, as one of them would say everything is going to be all right, and the other knows that you leave my bed feeling anything but all right. And so I know that at last your clear sight will win over what we both wish to have been. You cannot deny that what we have seen this night is the end of our intimate life together._

_Besides my abhorrence for any person or thing that would harm you in any way, I don't think I will ever be able to touch you without thinking of what I am stealing from you. What I have always known I was stealing from you, but could somehow excuse in the name of love. Now that I have seen the threat my system poses to yours, I will not endanger you any further. Just because most muggle measures of health have found you to be of sound constitution does not change the fact that in some important way you are weakened by contact with me. Else would you have to ration our intimacy so carefully? Hedwig tells me all about the nosebleeds and the dizzy spells that you obscure from me, and we know what Dumbledore thinks about the matter._

_Since we mostly speak by muggle means these days anyway, if you wish to call me and feel it will not harm you to stay in contact with me, then I am here by muggle methods of communication, or by bird. But I will never lay a finger on you again, Harry. It is a terrible price to pay, but I would pay anything to see you well._

_Love always,_

_S_


	54. Chapter 54

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 54: The Rehearsal

_And she hugged Gabricius with such love that she took him completely into her nature and divided him into numerous parts." _

_-Rosarium philosophorum, 1550_

So much of Harry is in me now that I don't need to hear from him to feel the rage and hurt that the letter causes him. Over the next several days I expect him to rail against our situation and then slowly begin to understand my resolve is final. I rent a room in a muggle hotel and gradually transfer some of my most essential items to the new room when I know Harry is likely to be away.

My campus housing is re-warded to only my signature. My heart is in my throat when I ask that my security code and keys be changed, much to the smug delight of the concierge who always thought Harry was a scandal.

Thankfully, I think Harry was spared the humiliation of being turned away from my flat. Without his magical signature the campus has lapsed into never-ending night for me. Occasionally I'll feel a trace of combined purple-pink-yellow and I can only take comfort in his friend Tristan supporting him through this injustice that wounds us both deeply, but which my life has perhaps prepared me better for.

Strangely, with Harry, the real reason for my activity, now definitively removed from the equation, I continue my hospital visits and muggle consultations at the clinic just as if nothing happened.

It's the need to keep busy when everything else has gone to shit—I know it quite well. But the ever-acute Shanti senses something as well, because she observes after one busy evening, "You look like hell." She takes in my tired look that is her only response. "It suits you, in a way."

"I aim to please, Shanti-ma."

"No," she stands in front of me with her hands on her hips. "You will not go to your flat or wherever it is you think you are going. I am going to cook for you."

If she had told me to jump off a building I would have immediately obeyed at that point, so I follow her, a lanky hulking wreck of a man with a stale smile, back to her apartment.

It is such a jarring contrast to what I expected that it does distract me for a moment.

The interior of her flat is teeming with art projects–chairs half-inlaid with a lighter wood pattern, mosaics that stretch halfway down the wall before dying in a burst of shattered tile and cement. Leering Javanese puppets hanging from the ceiling along with her own marionettes made out of brightly colored papers. Bits of rubbish strung on strings and hung in lieu of doors. Some muggle music that sounds like the bastard offspring of a jazz musician and a Harrumphing Heron was left on the player.

Everything smells like spices and rubber cement and that jasmine stuff she uses in her hair. I draw in deep breaths of it as if they will be my last. I don't expect to last long without Harry.

My gaze is drawn to several dioramas made of broken china and those muggle dolls of improbable proportions, one of which has been painted blue. "Hold on, is this meant to be the Bhagavad Gita?"

"Yes! An all-female version. It's a very long story so I'm afraid I'll never be finished with it."

My mind is trying to tell me that no normal person tries to represent sacred text with kewpie dolls, and thus she might not be the best stabilizing influence at a moment when I am poised before the void. But my heart is telling me she and Harry would get along famously, and at that I have to cling to the doorframe.

"It's a bit overwhelming at first. You'll get used to it," she propels me into a sort of parlor—well, the whole place seems like a warren of parlors with furniture low to the ground. She pushes me down on a pile of cushions and leaves me alone for some long minutes until she returns with some sort of gruel made out of beans and a sweetish milky drink whose flavor just reaches me around the Black Taste.

"Drink it yourself or I'll pour it down your throat," she says in a friendly tone.

That's all I remember until I wake up with a start the next morning, alone in her flat, having slept a record ten hours on that cushion.

For the first time since the Mark's aftermath left me mute, toxic and tethered to an IV machine, I call in sick to work.

A lot of things happen in my mind that long day, but none of them can be easily expressed. It was a conversation that occurred between me and my fate, and I can't say I understood it much better than most of the messages it's tried to give me. For hours on end I listened to this quasi-audible voice tell me what was what in a senseless murmur, and all I did was snivel and board up all the hope and love that Harry represented to me, and which will never come my way again.

It was a drying-out process after a long intoxication, those three days in Shanti's flat. I had come face to blank face with my addiction. With the nothingness I was trying to clothe in others' stolen life and color. And I had no idea how I was going to start again after this vision.

I lay on the cushion and tried to consider: what version of myself am I supposed to revert to, post-Harry? The man on the French seaside had one rock in his pocket at all times. The man I was before I met Harry was Marked, a monster property of Voldemort. And the young man of seventeen I was before I took the Mark was so long ago I can scarcely remember him.

But none of those men had sworn off their terrible vice forever. Even to Albus, I always kept some escape clause that let me steal and nearly kill because I needed love so badly.

Never again.

So I resolve like never before to live with the muggles, those dull individuals who aren't interesting enough to harm.

Bits of my relationships with Andre and Shanti pass before my eyes while I lay on the floor. I rehearse gestures, points of view, getting into character for this latest masquerade, not unlike the ones I had to endure after I lost James and the school came to know me as a homosexual, or after I lost Lilly and the school thought it knew me to be a racial purist.

This is all you can expect; try to have a smidgen of grace about it, you nonentity, is the lesson I have tried to learn at other times. This time I feel something sinking into my marrow and hope it is finally this one lesson.

Shanti finds me attached like a barnacle to the same cushion when she comes home that evening. "Julian-Ji, this won't do," she chides, not trying to hide her pleasure at finding me still in her place. "Here, I need your help." And she is surprised to see my hands' skill at crushing her seeds and spices to a uniform size with a mortar and pestle. She barks at me to add different ingredients at different times, and for a little while the only living parts of me, my hands, perform like trained brother beasts.

Shanti assures me the curry tastes better than any she's made in France, but I can't taste a thing.

My tongue has gone black this time for sure. My mind considers various ruses to get her to look at it and tell me.

"Thank you very much, Shanti-ma, but I must be going." The little bow I add at the end as our inside joke falls flat—I am apparently on probation and not allowed humor.

"I won't let you go home in this state, especially if you won't tell me what's wrong."

"I have to go to a—club."

"Take me with you."

"No," I laugh. "I'm sorry, but it's not your sort of place."

"Is it a sex club?" My mouth drops open. "Something has gone wrong with your Harry. Why don't you just tell me about it?"

"Some other time, perhaps,"

Just outside of her door I apparate to Gregor's Bar.

"You again," is all the squib says after my long absence. The wizards merely narrow their eyes as their hands tighten on their wands.

"Zanziwort, please," I order the obscure drink, which most people take as a hangover prevention, and discreetly tip my own phial of intoxicants into it. This is one night when my usual scruples about drugs don't apply.

My artificially relaxed smile is the most genuine one I've used in days. It only serves to make the wizards more suspicious—when have I ever been known to smile so before? I can hear the thought bouncing from head to head.

Hermés, but it's good to be going to shit among my own kind!

"Monsieur Pascal, I was wondering if I could have a word," I say, trying not to smile at the slight movement to his lips that betrays his beginning a hex at my approach.

"Of course, Monsieur Julian, I have been expecting you."

We withdraw to a private corner and the entire bar launches Amplifying charms in our direction. As I was counting on.

"So with your son so close with Harry, doubtless you know that we are no longer together."

"Is that so?" and I get a clear flash that Harry has spent several nights at his house. Good. "I might have picked up on something."

"Then you may also have gathered that I detest speaking of private matters with others, and would never tolerate any questions into my motives or actions when it comes to someone as dear to me as Harry."

His eyebrow inches up his forehead.

"However, if pressed I would emphasize that Harry has spent more time with your son than with me over several months," his swarthy face takes on a purple hue, "and that this wholesome activity with a group of young wizards and witches seems to bring him more happiness than spending time with a rather dull botanist." His face loses the purple and some of the tension it had besides. "To my sadly scientific eye, when a relationship loses the bright parts that help distract from the points of conflict, there is nothing left but to 'Banish the Brew' as my mother used to say about faulty potions."

"Yes, in Algeria we have a similar saying, 'Out with the bad before it takes the good with it,' is a rough translation,'" he says in French and then gives me the Berber original, which is actually more like 'Get out of here, ogre, there'll be no human flesh for you tonight.' I recognize it as one of the many variants of the banishing spells taught to children to keep away creatures that like to eat human tots in the middle of the night.

"Perfect! Then we understand each other," I grin at the apt description of my role.

"Of course," he says, though he is surprised I would think that whatever collusion I'm expecting would come so simply.

"Oh, and whoever would like to challenge me on my commitment to Harry's well-being will find my wand at the ready." A bar's-worth of wand-hands (except the squib's) moves to their wands like a huge centipede with two dozen limbs controlled by the same nerve.

Except for me; I don't need one. My casual stance with my hands swinging at my sides as I leave makes me seem like either an overconfident fool or someone who knows something they don't.

Which is exactly where I want them.

"Did you have a good time?" Shanti asks when I show up at her door without even bothering to make up an excuse to hide my fear of being alone.

"Oddly, yes," I say, still enjoying the effects of the draught I took earlier. There's so much to look at in her home. I spend some time flat on my back gazing at all the glittering surfaces until I feel her eyes upon me. Damn this muggle for being so much more distracting than the others, I think, wishing to be left alone to lose myself in all her bright belongings. "What is that, on the ceiling?"

"It's a mixture of beads and dried seeds. I got the idea to make a mandala on the ceiling but it's very difficult to get even very small things to stick, and it gave me such a crick in my neck."

"Really? What is it supposed to look like?" She is surprised at my unusual interest in something other than the few books and notepapers I've brought by for my classes.

"Well, you see, that's the problem. It's like I have an idea in my mind but it keeps changing. I guess that's why it was hard to commit to the hours of work to just depict one of them."

"Here. Draw one of them for me. Or several."

She puts a few rough sketches to paper and while I study them hunts for others amidst her mountains of things. "This one I did quite some time ago, but you see it has that blue thing like this one from a few months ago."

I fall asleep with one of her drawings in my hand. When I wake up in the early morning she is standing above me, dressed but with wet hair, considering me.

As casually as possible I pass my hand over my nose to make sure she is not considering the real me, but it is merely the wreck of a man who has washed up on the bank of cushions in her parlor.

"Are you all right, when I leave you here alone during the day?"

"I'm fine," I say while clinging to the cushion. "I'm thinking."

"But haven't you told me several times that you're like your mother, in that you need to keep busy and do something with your hands, that just thinking isn't good for you?"

I'm too tired to damn this muggle for listening too closely.

"What would your mother have you do?"

"Degranulate seeds. Maybe have a nice chop." This reminds me of how, in her last couple of years, my mother degranulated more seeds than I could ever possibly use. It did her good to feel useful doing this last magical task after her wand and her knife had stopped obeying her, so my father and I ordered huge supplies of seeds like Simpersaw, Edenulous Beech and Bud o'Banshee, the ones that take a bit of work to separate from their husks and thus provided my mother with the most satisfaction.

When I return to the present, Shanti is bustling in one of her overflowing closets. "They're not seeds, but I'm sure your hands will like working with them," she says, returning with armfuls of plastic cases full of all sorts of beads. "Do whatever your hands feel like doing. And these," she takes out some long brownish beads, tapered at both ends. "These are made from triangular strips of magazines. See here," and she demonstrates with rolling up a triangle of colored paper around a long needle until it furls up into a bead. "For these you need to spray them with fixant and let them dry."

Before Shanti has put on her coat to minister to the sick, she has already set up one ailing man with enough occupational therapy to last for a week. "I expect to see some progress when I come back, Julian-ji," she says in that fierce voice that brooks no disagreement.

"Yes, Shanti-ma," I say, my hands already reaching of their own accord for a bead.

For those long hours while she is gone, my hands are active. Just like my mother in the depths of her madness, my hands show themselves not to be totally dead with the rest of me. Each bead is strung according to its magical property, not any aesthetic consideration. My eyes are closed much of the time, in fact, and I follow this magical sense that has never done me much good, never was good enough to keep me from hurting anyone I loved, but is yet good enough that I can string beads without looking. When my hands tire of that task, I make hundreds of paper beads. It doesn't take long to set aside that muggle adhesive and make my own compound out of odds and ends I find around the house. Fixed with a bolt of magic, my little senseless bead enterprise becomes a one-man factory. There are improvements to be made with how the photographs are selected from the pile of old magazines, and by the time Shanti walks through the door I have made an entire curtain of unassuming-looking beads that yet has the texture and feel of all my love I'll never be able to express again to Harry. My one and only art project, of the sort I had hoped we could do together someday.

She runs her hand over it and looks at me, frightened. "When I said I'd check on you, I didn't mean—" her eyes take in the miles of bead strings littering the apartment. "Are you quite all right, Julian?"

I don't know how to answer that question on a good day. Today my hands fidget and speak for me.

"How about a nice chop, then?" she suggests. "I think we could both use a good strong curry."

Shanti goes to her room to change and comes out with half the contents of her refrigerator in the midst of being chopped.

I remembered the ingredients from the sauce I helped grind up with the mortar and pestle the other night. Curries are like those fragrances my grandmother favored: they have a sort of equation, so my hands find some new things that seem like they might go well with the basics.

Shanti stands there staring at me. "I'm sorry, Shanti-ma, this is your kitchen and I got sort of excited. It takes my mind off things like you wouldn't believe."

"It's uncanny," she breathes. "Are you sure you don't have any training as a cook?"

"I just dabble. Baking, for instance, is a complete mystery to me. Why?" I ask while finishing up the large bag of onions from the pantry.

"Because it's like watching one of those chaps from the cooking programs on television," she says. "I'd cut my finger off if I moved that fast. You can scarcely see the knife."

"Really? I'd never thought about it. But this, dear Shanti, is about the extent of my physical coordination."

She puts something on the music player, a harpsichord album she rightly thinks is to my taste, and I chop everything choppable. Together we make curry enough to freeze for months.

I can't taste a thing, however, so I pick at my food and listen to Shanti tell me about her day. After I've cleaned up the dishes I retreat to my little corner and cling to the last cushion before the void.

"I'm scared, Julian," she bursts out. "You look terrible and you won't tell me what has gone wrong with your Harry. Should I make you come out of this apartment and force you to talk to someone? What should I do?"

"You can drag me anywhere you like. I'm not able to verbalize my feelings. It's one of my many impediments." And then once more I hear Harry's voice telling me that, with the warm and wonderful way he has—had—of making all my deficiencies and burdens a little lighter, a little less frightening, and I realize that's all gone forever. I should never have had that. I stole it. The way I stole Harry from whatever better destiny he would have had without me.

When the arms close around me I start.

"Ssh, Julian, just let it out," Shanti whispers, stroking my father's hair.

And I do. I cry and I blubber and I snivel. I grind my head into this muggle woman's lap and I groan out my fears and self-hatred in Basque so that she can't understand this bizarre tale that wouldn't make any sense to her anyway.

That night I sleep little, but my wakefulness is not out of disquiet. After three days I know my lines. Like after James, Albus told me what to do and I got into character and did it, except when I was following the bright star in my darkness that was Lilly. After Lilly, Lessmore told me what to do and I focused on the healing arts and our research. After I took the Mark, my life was alternately owned by Albus and Voldemort. Harry gave me my lines all these last couple of years and I liked his writing the best.

Now I listen to the low notes belonging to this muggle's sleep from the opposite end of the apartment. It doesn't matter what this woman knows or understands about me, how badly she misunderstands me as a magical creature or a man. The sounds of her dreams, her healing arts and impatience and humor and pushiness. They could easily be a different mixture belonging to someone else. But they're an asymptote that helps keep my personal equations from spilling out all over my life-graph. She's predictable. I'm predictable. It's less terrible being predictable in someone's general direction.

I can do this.

The next day Shanti watches me get dressed but says nothing until I ask her if I can borrow some of her mandala sketches.

"Whatever you need, Julian."

She thinks she means it. This moves me, for some reason, this innocent belief that we might be anything other than a collection of lines and curves and deterministic squiggles on a graph.

I return to my responsibilities that day, confident that I look enough of a wreck that no one will dispute my supposed illness. The drawings are introduced into my assistants' data pool, and like everything else these days there are a couple interesting correlations but the big breakthrough we can all sense just around the corner continues to elude us. The very fact that I can get interested in my research makes me realize how grateful I am to Shanti for letting me stay. It's as though her will is the only thing keeping that thin veneer of humanity from sliding off the emptiness within.

That night I return to her apartment. Shanti pulls out some old photo albums and I learn more about her and her cousin and other family members. Her family tale may be different than mine, but I pick up on the resentments and losses and brief moments of joy that are the primary colors every family has to paint with.

The last night I spend in her apartment I bring one of my magical adhesives that is compatible with the ceiling. After she is asleep I create a charm that is not too difficult even for someone with modest capabilities such as myself. Instructed to assemble themselves on the ceiling according to one of Shanti's favored designs, the bits of glass, seeds, colored paper and plastic leap up to the primed surface and are trapped there for what will probably be forever, so I hope she likes it.

Harry's purple has been gone from France for two days. I know because the claustrophobia I feel in my own fate has returned. So I spend the next day writing up lesson plans for the rest of the semester, in hopes that I can go around as if under Imperius for the remaining time at the school.

I show up at the laboratory carrying a paper sack from the grocery store and a guilty conscience. Ever since seeing my True Face in the PET machine, my visits to feed Mick have been very sparse. It's as though I'm experiencing déjà vu of when all the plans Lilly and I had made were washed away in the asylum's disinfectant bath along with the precious Ouroborous. I can't conceive of any part of that trip to save Harry's and my relationship turning out well.

"Hello, Julian," Andre greets me with a broad grin.

"Er, hello Andre," I say, trying to figure out why this muggle is smiling at me. I pick out the container of goat cheese from my sack and only when I've got a bit on a spatula do I realize:

Mick is already enjoying some goat cheese.

And Andre is enjoying my shock.

"Tell me how," is all I can say.

The researcher's brow furrows. "I don't know. I wish I did. I don't even know if I'll be able to replicate these two successes tomorrow."

"Two? You chose the right substance on another occasion?"

"Yes, it's very strange. Yesterday I bought one of those bags of mixed nuts out of the machine because I was in a rush, and since I don't like walnuts I decided to give them to Mick as one of his random controls."

"You realize that the operative factor here is much more specific than just a type of nut," I say.

"Yes, yes of course, we've determined that when trying to replicate your choices on the same day. I went back out and bought a different brand and Mick wasn't interested."

"And today?"

"I bought a sandwich in the cafeteria without realizing it had goat cheese in it. I'm not fond of dairy, so again, I gave it to Mick."

Then I see that a slice of the whole sandwich is in there because Andre couldn't isolate which part of it the creature might be attracted to. When I put my hand in that direction I can feel its Spagyrics are nearly identical to the stuff I bought. Perhaps they're from the same collection of goats.

"If I could guess correctly on a consistent basis, the department would have to give me a fellowship to keep me around."

And neither of us has to complete the thought: grants, academic standing, many things could follow, all of which could help guarantee the freedom to pursue the knowledge that is his real interest.

Then his face falls. "Unless, Julian, I mean, after all, Mick was your discovery—"

"Andre, my friend, I can't tell you how happy I am that the two of you are getting on," I say, and when he still looks uncertain, I actually clap him on the shoulder in what I know to be the correct muggle gesture for the moment. "I hope great things will come of it, but at the very least I don't need to feel so guilty about bringing him here."

The man looks extremely relieved. "So, then, about these cures you say you saw in this unnamed country…" This is the first time he's ventured into any practical uses for the mold he's been studying so carefully.

"'I say I saw?' You wouldn't know a dermis from an epidermis!"

And thus begins the first of many enjoyable conversations in which the gloves come off (figuratively speaking, because my friend insists upon using precautions with Mick) and we berate, joke and theorize sometimes late into the night about the theory and practice of Animate life forms and their application to wound care.

That night I return to my apartment and, as is my custom, tell Anouk about my day.

"If only Lessmore could have been there," I sigh to the bird. "This is exactly the sort of thing she wanted for me when she started my school fund. If only that's what the money could have been used for, instead of for my asylum fees."

"Now, don't mope. I know what you should do!" exclaims Anouk. "Write a letter to Lessmore telling her all about your conversation with this other fellow and I'll pretend to carry it to her as if you were sending her a post asking for advice."

It sounds foolish, but my bird friend was right: pretending Lessmore was still there to receive the report about my conversations with my muggle counterpart did make it feel as though my old friend was there to listen with her unfailing good sense and occasional incisive humor. How I wish she were really there to help me pick up the pieces once again.

_Dear Madam Lessmore,_

_You were right. Of course you were right. When everything else has fallen apart, when everyone we've ever tried to touch has slipped from our grasp, there is always the work._

_Muggle science has so far taught me very little of all the things I need to know about myself and my condition. But if I am still in the same quandary as ever, a danger to my own kind, I can at least take comfort that muggle science may benefit in some small way from the talents you always valued more highly than I could._

_Perhaps I have yet to apply all of myself to my belated search for knowledge. I only wish you could be here with me to meet Andre and Mick and laugh at the haphazard logic employed by some of the scientists. It's just as you said school would be: I can talk with someone who comes from a completely different background and who couldn't care less if I came from the moon, because it's all about the work._

_Your student always,_

_Severus Snape_

And the most amazing thing was, slowly but surely, this muggle was beginning to develop what would become an unfailing, if not replicable, sense for what this ancient creature needs in the middle of the modern world.


	55. Chapter 55

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 55: The Sheet

Not all of my mixing of disparate things goes so well, however.

The group of healers, diviners and small-time shamans turns to me as one body when I walk into the institute for the first time since leaving Shanti's apartment.

"Julian, what do you think of this design?" a seer from Bolivia who I have always found rather unnerving says to me in a conspiratorial way that shows that he expects I will say something positive.

"Lovely," I say and he looks triumphant. More staff and volunteers crowd around, smothering me with their muggle flesh that's just beginning to speak to me.

"This one for the floor!"

"For the window!"

"You must make one for my studio!"

"So powerful!"

"So energizing!"

"So soothing!"

Shanti's warmth has been trying to contain itself but finally she flings herself upon me. "Julian-ji! No one has ever made me such a lovely gift! And you said you weren't artistic! What other talents are you hiding from us?" she says, effectively muzzling me with her mounds of dark curls in my mouth as she embraces me. She gives me a sonorous kiss to my cheek and dances away while I try to hide my discomfort.

She couldn't have known. I can't blame her for her action releasing one of those little miseries that can be counted upon in life: exactly the wrong thing happening at the wrong time. But the rest of the staff, who have regarded me with curiosity from a distance, as if following Shanti's lead with her "find," they all throw their arms around me in turn, sometimes more than one at the same time, thanking me in advance for the mandalas they've volunteered me to make.

My body is trying to adjust to being without its purple home forever, and drowning in this dull skin is like rehearsing a malediction. But once they have given themselves permission to cross this one boundary, it seems to satisfy their need to know me at all. The mostly-female group coos and drapes around me every time I am at the institute like they're in the presence of one of those ghastly pieces of furniture made of live animals that were all the rage in my grandmother's heyday.

Claiming that my mandalas are the fruit of intense meditation, I make each of their little designs in the dark of night and take some grim comfort that I am stealing their images for use in my growing database of mostly unrelated facts.

What right do I have to protest the unwanted attention from these strangers? It's my lot in life, being condemned to the company of creatures I can't harm and skin that doesn't speak to me. I need to adjust myself to commerce with muggles once and for all.

And so Julian affixes a polite smile on his face and rehearses his future without love or sensuality with each unwanted touch from the Garudas.

With Shanti, however, I do eventually protest. I'm not sure why, but it feels like something has gone awry with this person I had considered to be a friend in the making, measured on Severus Snape's long, slow timeline of trust. She is by nature physically affectionate, and seems to want to comfort me in this dark time I can't seem to hide from her. But something about the hugs and the tousling of my hair makes my skin crawl in a way that has a familiar edge to it. It's like the tactile version of That Look Dumbledore used to train on me.

On the way out of one of these black-tasting dinners she drags me to, I place it at last: it reminds me of when the MAHB-US group treated me like the last of a species. A eunuch in the harem.

She puts her arm through mine as we walk down the street and I stiffen.

"Loosen up, Julian," she says, a little tipsy. "I'm not going to ask for a kiss."

"I am not a pet," I snap, staring straight ahead at the street.

She moves away, stung.

"And don't make assumptions."

She stares at me. "Such as?"

"Such as that I would be averse to such a request."

Before I know what I am doing my hand tilts her face up and I kiss her.

With Lilly our kiss came after we'd been playing sexual games for months that would make Bigham himself blush. I've never kissed anyone first. Never anything like this surprise, out-of-context gesture that is completely out of both of my characters.

It comes as a great relief.

It's like smoothing out a wrinkle that had existed between us.

If my sexual awakening was all twisted up in the sheets boiling around my aunt during that fateful dream, this was a smooth sheet stretching as far as I could see. A new sense that calm and constancy, never a part of my life, were right next to me if I wanted to take them. After being around all these healers and shamans and despairing of my ability to see what they see, it's as though just one of these long-dormant senses has woken up.

Actually, I see that it's been in the process of waking up for some time, but I was intent upon ignoring it. The feeling of irritation Shanti caused in me, her unnerving warmth—it's been her attractiveness battering against a door that's never been opened. With this kiss she bursts into every inch of me like a hot wave washing through an empty house.

All of this occurs to me in the space of a few seconds, but when that wave retreats it does not leave the same house behind.

We part and look at each other. Then she slaps me.

"All this time I have been suffering, thinking I am mad to have this sense about you, and then you do this!"

She stalks off.

Perhaps easy would have been too much of a change for me.

"Shanti! Shanti-ma! Wait!"

Without looking back she gives me what it takes me a few seconds to identify as the two-fingered salute.

The next dark alley is a good place to apparate, so I go to my cottage at the sea. There is an old crate I used to drag out to the sand and let the wind whip me for my sins. The local wildlife is surprised to see me there with my head in my hands.

"We never chat anymore," a kestrel chides me.

"When you're here you're always holed up in that house working," a gull agrees.

"How do I tell the difference between attraction and mere curiosity?" I ask them.

"Isn't attraction a kind of curiosity?" a pelican responds.

"But this is not like anyone I've ever been with. There's no urgency. Harry and I had a hard time not tearing off each other's clothes in public."

"If it's so different, then you must be very curious," the pelican says.

My hands need to be busy in order for my mind to reach that level of true clarity that I need. So I make many extra batches of some of the best-selling items, mostly aphrodisiacs and a lot of Polyjuice. A dirty song occurs to me, one I've heard about brewing the delicate Pennypoor potion, which is one of the few that relies upon rote stirring rather than having the option of using a spoon charmed to a rhythmic beat:

Brew me well,

Stir by hand,

And I'll swell

The dullest wand.

Brew me ill,

Stir by charm,

And I will

Heat to harm.

The potions cooling in the cauldrons, I step out onto the porch, feeling pleasantly tired. Apparently I switched to singing the song in bird language, because a kestrel overhears me and it's the laughingstock of the seaside that evening.

"The Lout is singing about his—you know!"

Birds are rather squeamish about intimate questions.

When I return to Paris I bring a few small phials of the aphrodisiac Pascal habitually orders from the Alkahest. If I say that one of my botanical contacts paid me in kind for a service and offer them to the group, he won't connect me to his frequent orders. The poor man has some type of imbalance (his nature is naturally Warm but his system is positively Cold) but short of dosing his food on the sly there's no way to help him.

"Where have you been keeping yourself?" Pascal asks with a flick of his heavily lidded eyes. I seem to have made more of a fixture of myself at Gregor's than I realized.

"I was out of the country on business. A contact provided me with these samples, which I am sadly not in a humor to use at the moment."

The phials—sans the usual Alkahest label—are placed on the counter. All the men feign disinterest, but I can feel their pulses quickening. A night with Pennypoor, Winternight Comfort, or Twin-thistle Elixir is always a night to remember.

"How do we know that these are sound?" Someone says several minutes later.

A tap of my wand coaxes a Reveal from the three varieties: dark green, light green, yellow tending to pink, respectively. Textbook-perfect colors.

Only one of the women correctly surmises that I must have something to do with the Invisible School, because only a great adept can produce a Reveal without even an incantation.

It takes an effort of will to not to allow the flash of pride this gives me for my mother's sake to reach my face. The last thing I need is for these people to know I'm a Legillimens.

Pascal asks a few questions about side effects to make it seem like he doesn't know very well that too many doses can give you the Scrofulous Fugue.

Discreetly I turn away to signal for a fresh drink. When I turn back, the phials are gone.

"He's gone, isn't he?" I say to the stocky man who is now distracted by the prospect of using his little treasure.

"He left for England, yes. Belda and I encouraged him and thankfully he saw it was for the best. Your friend Dumbledore will look after him. A life harder than most, young Harry's."

"Perhaps about to become slightly less difficult," I say and raise my glass. "To Harry."

"Harry." "Harry Potter." The other patrons raise their glasses as well and we drink.

Now that I can be sure that I won't run into my former lover, I surprise myself by going to Gregor's almost every night for at least a quick one and a chat with the barman, who is a font of information about wizard gossip. Sometimes it's for a game of wizard chess with Pascal or one of the other more international magical individuals. These wizards and witches with at least one foot in another country help make the terrible cold that has settled within my marrow a little more bearable. They, too, aren't a perfect fit anywhere.

When I hear someone mentioning that they are going to hear some chamber music that weekend, a witch almost draws out her wand in shock when I ask if I can accompany them. I've always been Harry's sidekick, but have never gone alone on one of their evenings out. There seems to be a special exclusivity with regards to who goes on the musical ventures in particular.

"You? What would you want with such an excursion?" The female ministry employee, whose name is Babette, snarls.

"Because the melancholy find Bach to be an extraordinary tonic for the heavy heart?" I laugh lightly.

The fact that I didn't even reach for my wand is again noted. Fool or fakir, they can't decide.

Grudgingly, they arrange for another ticket. When I apparate to the concert hall I half-expect an ambush, but I simply take my seat and forget all about everything for a little while, only occasionally smiling a little at the wards the other wizards and witches have thrown up around themselves so that they can relax as well.

"So?" I say to the ring of faces that has taken up their glares once again when we're outside the concert hall.

"So come with us," they say as if it's a dare. They know better than to touch me, so they merely gaze up to the top of a tall building before they apparate there. It takes only a moment for me to follow the delicious knot of magics, and then I am beside them, curious to see whether they're going to try to push me off the building as a fitting end to the evening's enjoyment.

When they each pull out their wands with deliberate slowness, my heart quickens in the hope that they do plan a mass Cruciatus or something.

One by one, the wizards and witches murmur an incantation. And one by one, their wands spit out a bit of stolen music culled from the concert we just took in. The music becomes the visual version of the Bach and Haydn, a glittering landscape of cherubs and solemnly spinning planets and ladies and gentlemen with delicate calves half-glimpsed under confining vestments.

My mouth is hanging open over the perfect translation of the same ideas and sensibility from one medium to another, and then the images are scattered into the night sky.

They look at me and dare me to fault them for what they need to do to make any aesthetic experience complete. We are wizards—masters of imitation, comes the haughty look. Those muggles don't even know the half of what they do with their boxes of wood strung with strings.

"Is that Correlamus?" I finally say to break the silence.

And we apparate to Gregor's bar to have an enjoyable argument about the best music-harvesting charms.

On Wednesday, about two weeks after kissing Shanti and two weeks after I had accepted that our friendship was ruined forever, she seems to be lingering as she's closing up the institute. I take it as an openness to talking.

"If I come closer will you slap me, Shanti-ma?"

"Perhaps," she says while beginning to collapse her Reiki table, and the heat rolling off her finally registers as what it is.

My hand presses against the latch that will fold the table in two. "Leave it."

Her face, always so defiant, now shows itself to have been stubbornly hanging on to a conviction that I would wake up and discover her right where she's been all along.

My nose rubs in her hair, against the curve in her neck I now realize has been possessing my dreams, against her décolletage, the skin on the inside of her elbow, her wrist, the palm of her hand. "Shanti-ma," my lips confess to her wand-hand that is positively charged not unlike a magician's.

Her hand presses my head up and she kisses me.

"I can buy you a new table," I say several hours later when she is standing naked in the Institute kitchenette to make us tea.

Her laugh bubbles something over inside of me like a buoyant Simperwillow mixture that has been stirred clockwise instead of counterclockwise as it always has been, as I've always thought it had to be. I pull her to the carpet for one more lesson in the huge new world of clockwise enjoyments.

When we finally put on our clothes it is the middle of the night. A shadow passes over Shanti's face as we move to tidy up the Institute.

"What's the matter? Are you unwell?" I'm by her side in a flash, examining her face and her energy for any sign of depletion.

"I was just thinking I'm going to have a very hard time forgetting tonight when making eye contact with all of the Garudas," she chuckles, using our private name for the healers and empaths at the Institute. "Julian, are you unwell?"

It's only then that I realize I'm in the mostly-controlled panic that I usually experience after Harry and I make love. I was actually wishing I had my trident with me to see how much damage I'd done to her.

"No, Shanti-ma, I'm fine, very well. Very, very well, extremely well," and a bewildered muggle woman takes a weeping wizard into her arms that are miraculously immune to his poison.

We say goodbye outside the Sun and I walk around until morning, trying to understand if this is what I should have been doing all these years instead of stealing from the men of my kind I've been unable to avoid loving. As of today, a bright moment doesn't have to cast such a long shadow. It's as though I am benefiting from a sudden and favorable shift in the exchange rate.

It seems like using my father's body to make love must be what makes things so easy between Shanti and me, but it's not true. Up until recently, no matter which body I was wearing at the time, only men—only Harry—excited me. But I am secretly relieved when she calls out the name "Julian" and I can keep this Severus character who's always mucking things up so badly out of the picture. "I" am no longer either of these largely fictional personages. "I" am the being that is born anew every time Shanti takes me to her unending warmth that I drink up like the freezing soul that I am.

When I visit Rukmini, the soothing current of her quiet mind makes me quickly begin mistaking her for my mother once again.

"What was it like for you, mother, to marry a muggle? I know you had at least some of my abilities, so it must have been strange for you, being with someone you couldn't sense. Does it really matter, being with someone who will never know what it is like to cast a spell or disappear or make things appear out of nothing? You must have found something with my father, because everything I know about you says that you wouldn't settle for second best."

One thing that borrowing my father's form has done is create a greater sympathy for him in my mind. That and constantly mining my memory for instances in which he mentioned magical herbs that had some effect on him have put Augustus Snape at the center of my attention for the first time ever. Who was this man when the woman he loved hadn't yet washed up on the shore of his life, a wreck of herself?

Shanti and I are spending all of our time together outside of our work responsibilities, Rukmini and the institute, but one thing she can't come to terms with is why I feel compelled to go to this mysterious "club" and why she's not welcome.

"If this is some kinky sex club, I'll make you pay," she says, and I'm glad it's just an uncontrollable urge to play wizard chess.

"No, Shanti, it's just expatriates talking in a dozen languages about their homelands, it's very dull."

"I'm an expatriate. A double-expat, if it comes to that."

"Yes, well, I just need to clear my head. You understand," and I apparate after leaving her flat so that I can once more stave off the terrible nostalgia for the wizard society that has never done me any favors but now hits me nightly with a gale force without Harry.

"What are the rules about telling a muggle partner about our world?" I blurt without preamble once my drink has been served.

They look at me, surprised. "You don't know?"

"I've never needed to know."

"Well, tell us about him first of all!"

In recent weeks I've discovered that these wizards and witches never disliked me. They were uncomfortable with how very much in love Harry and I were. It's not seemly for magical individuals to grasp loving so well. It's like a wizard or witch becoming a concert pianist. All that passion put to no purpose doesn't make a lot of sense in a utilitarian culture, and that's why they used to study Harry and me so closely. Magical folk mate like birds mate—seriously, respectfully, and with all the messy bits done in private. Even Giancarlo and Toby, whose passion burned like a live fuse so vivid that it was immortalized in song, they were, as I say, very protective of their privacy. Harry and I weren't overly demonstrative, but the occasional kiss on the cheek coupled with the deep, defiant love anyone could see was perhaps too much for our compatriots to bear.

Now that Harry is gone they have accepted me as the genuine article—a dyed in the wool wizard—and I can sense they are curious as to whether I am naturally passionate or it was just a love-match that has thankfully proven itself unsustainable with Harry.

"She is a muggle healer of Anglo-Indian background." Some of the women reevaluate me very quickly and look put out. "This is a very awkward situation for me, " and they surprise me by reacting warmly to the upset in my voice.

"You're supposed to notify the ministry before you do," a woman named Rebecca who trades in antiquities says. "It's a formality, but with you not having many ties in Paris you should."

"But how do you tell them? I just sit her down and say that the world is not as she always has thought?"

The few wizards and witches who have gone through the process regale us with hilarious tales about muggles who couldn't or wouldn't believe even after being shown spells or taken to magical forests to see hippogriffs.

"The way I told a man I was seeing was by transfiguring into a cat, my familiar animal," Rebecca chuckles. "The poor man never got over it. He thought any animal was a transfigured human and had a terrible phobia about being observed even by insects. And he wouldn't let me make a sound when I did convince him to make love, because he said it sounded like I was purring or meowing and it gave him the willies to be holding a cat!"

Everyone laughs, but I pale at the idea of Shanti seeing me un-transifgured. "So the man walked around with a phobia for the rest of his life?"

"No," Rebecca says sadly. "I Obliviated away his memory of the incident. And the rest of his memories of being with me. It's the only way to proceed if they don't take it well."

So I could lose Shanti entirely. Wonderful.

"Well, I suppose anything is better than her thinking I've gone to a swinger's club every night."

"Is that what she takes us for?"

The general hilarity doesn't reach me, but I can appreciate their perspective. With the taboo on group sex so deeply ingrained even in the more liberal French wizard culture, most magical people would find just about any pastime more enjoyable than risking the ancestral curse against sex magic.

"You'll find a way, Julian. Our world is just as old as theirs—all you have to do is open the door. The rest is just letting her try to make her own sense of our ways."

I nod and promptly push the conversation to the back of my mind. There are so many things to do every day. One of the things I like best about Shanti is that she touches things, she makes things. It's what I liked about Harry, too. And his mother. Our wizarding world actively frowns upon any physical dexterity because it means you aren't able to produce the same effect with a spell.

We potions adepts are practically alone in that our magic requires chopping and often stirring by hand, as well as clambering around in the dirt collecting larvae and toadstools, and we are often looked down on for it. But I've always been drawn to people who touch things, and now Shanti and I make complicated curries and throw bits of onion at each other and she turns on her potter's wheel and guides my hands to shape the delicious mud.

After several days of peace, in which she doesn't see me go off to the "club" and I am observing her like mad, trying to guess what she's going to say when she finds out that magic is real, I open my mouth over dinner. "I have tickets for the theater. My friend Pascal invited me to accompany his group and I thought you might like to join us." In reality, I've engineered this entire event.

She is surprised and then pleased but hides it. "What is the show?"

"Marlowe's Faust." The magical subtext with curses and knowledge pursued without thought to penalty is exactly the sort of thing wizards love because they love being in the know. I don't plan on revealing that subtext to her on this occasion, but I hope that a few meetings with these people will help ease Shanti into the idea that there are other modern-day humans who are much closer to the 16th century playwright's presentiments of another reality.

Shanti and I meet near the metro after I am through with the lab. I am as nervous as if I were taking her to meet my parents. It's bigger than that. I'm taking her to meet my civilization.

When we arrive at the theater I introduce her to Pascal, his wife, Belda (who is still trying to forget that I'm the person that hurt her son's best friend); Rebecca, the antiquities dealer, her husband Antoine, and two other magical couples.

They allow themselves to be inspected by this muggle woman, passing around the thought that she had believed them to be sexual deviants. If I wasn't on pins and needles, I would be amused. Instead, I am paralyzed by the awkward sense that it is my responsibility to blend these two realities and I can't think of a thing to say.

"Let's go in, man, the curtain rises soon. Do you have the tickets?" Antoine asks.

Par la Rose-Croix! I've been worrying about this encounter so much! "No, I forgot them, a curse on me."

Shanti looks disappointed. "We won't make the curtain if we go back even by taxi."

Pascal scoffs. "You forget who you are with, Mademoiselle. Julian will just apparate to his apartment and back. It will only take a moment."

"He'll what?"

"You haven't told her?" Eight different colors of magic are pointing at my jugular.

"I keep meaning to make an appointment with the Ministry," I mutter.

"Told me what?" All of Shanti's misgivings about this group of people are back at the fore. She glares at the looks on our faces, obviously sharing a secret. "I'm going home unless you tell me what this is about."

I apparate home for the tickets.

When I return a few moments later, they've told her something, but seeing me disappear probably was the most eloquent introduction to my world. My Shanti follows us wizards inside in a daze, and sits through the first half of the show obviously not seeing anything but her world stretching to accommodate the scientifically impossible.

At intermission she accepts a drink which she downs in silence. Everyone else comments about the play, which is just to our taste—bitter, dark and arch. I offer her one of the unguents I brought back, something to calm her, and she flinches away from it was if it were a snake.

In the second half all I can do is try to sense what she is feeling. There is none of the calm or warmth I am used to, so I go a little further into her world than I've dared before. It's nowhere near as clear as listening to a magical mind, but in flashes I grasp that Shanti is thinking about a shaman she saw when she was a little girl in India. He had skewers piercing his flesh all over, and he walked on hot coals, iron spikes, even jumped impossible distances in the air.

Half-remembered images and fleeting impressions are assembling themselves in her mind. She feels stupid for not seeing it before, and then angry that everyone, especially me, never told her. She wonders if I've been hypnotizing her or drugging her, if my intent is actually to heal or if it is something more sinister. She realizes I've told her very little about me. She resolves to contact my friends behind my back to ask more.

I'll have to remember to drop some more false history with my magical friends to make my life seem more believable for her, I note to myself.

Then I withdraw from her mind because I don't want to wake up that thing that lives inside her and has a terrifying ability to look through my layers of falsehood.

The antics on stage don't register as a parallel to her, but I see all the smiting and the damnation as the literal truth. I've just made this woman infinitely more vulnerable, in exchange for sharing one of the best-kept secrets of all time. Picturing the stony silence this gap produced between me and my father, I get up from my seat and follow our group out, feeling her behind me.

We stand outside listening to our companions argue good-naturedly about exactly which spells were referred to in the play, and rehashing the old chestnut that Marlowe was actually killed for revealing too much about the Wizarding world.

"Shanti-ma, would you like to come to the club?" I ask before she can say she wants to go home. She nods. "We'll go by taxi and see you in a few minutes," I say to everyone.

The few who have had to have similar conversations look sympathetic. "We'll have some drinks ready for you," Rebecca says.

Shanti shrugs on her coat, looking small and worn for the first time since I've known her. "I don't like these surprises with you, Julian. Even when they are good surprises," her eyes flit down to my mouth and back to meet my gaze.

"This is not something I'm even allowed to share without permission," I object. "Though I have been putting that off. I've never told anyone before, you see, and I didn't know where to start."

A cab stops for us and we get in. My finger to my lips indicates we should wait to discuss further. I place my palm next to hers and conjure a tiny Belletrope flower, which quickly grows larger than our hands and she pulls hers back with a shock. My hand puts the flower behind her ear as I whisper into it. "There are many things the people at the club don't know about me, things I can do that few can. Promise me you will be aware of this whenever you are with them."

Her eyes wide, she nods. Resisting the urge to look inside her mind and see how this is going, I take her hand and hold it. She allows me to, and we stare out the taxi windows at the Paris that is only one side of a coin.

After I pay the taxi driver, I see her looking confused. "I have been to this street many times before. Where is this club of yours?"

Pulling her arm through mine, I walk to the blank wall between two shops closed for the night. My hand on the eleventh brick from the bottom, halfway between the door and the shopwindow, I mutter the charm.

Rebecca leads my trembling friend to a chair. She instructs Gregor to open a new bottle of muggle cognac. "La Chance brand, just like you buy at a store." Rebecca levitates the bottle closer so that Shanti can inspect it, and Gregor merely looks on with a sneer. Like many squibs, he doesn't think highly of muggles.

My companion stares at the bottle floating in midair and finally nods. When a glass is floated over under the bartender's resentful gaze, Shanti accepts the large serving of cognac gratefully. Then Belda very deliberately conjures a cool cloth and lets Shanti process this before she presses the cloth to her temples and forehead.

Seeing that my companion is beginning to ask questions, I transmit my eternal gratitude with a look to Belda and Rebecca, and sink down in a chair next to one of the men. Thank Hermés that no one really bizarre-looking is here tonight! Though mostly they would hang out at the bandit's den where my Severus Snape self would go.

Letting go of this layer of pretense between us is a surprising relief, but the release can only go so far. There are limits to what I can tell Shanti. Letting her know that this Snape character is in the mix would be enough to earn her undying hatred and possibly a banishment order from the magical authority. Deciding what these limits are, and consistently sticking to them, is mainly what has held up this little revelation.

"She came here with you. That's a good sign," Antoine says.

"Did she slap you?" Pascal asks eagerly. He got a lot of enjoyment out of my recounting Shanti's spirited response to our kiss.

"Not yet. Though the night is young."

We clink glasses as I throw down the shot they've bought me for courage. "To your wand!" comes the ancient toast.

Some of the men have changed into their robes because they are more comfortable. Someone has conjured a person-less orchestra like my grandmother used to, and quiet music plays in the background. Wall sconces and a few floating lamps light the murky space.

"I'm assuming you have a license for her?" The bartender scowls at me when I motion for him.

"It's in the works. Do you have any Blooming Wine?" He scowls at the ornate bottle clearly displayed in pride of place on his main shelf. "You do know that I come across rare potions sometimes in my travels?"

He brightens. "Can you get me some of that Remember-Me lotion that will let me get into my own damn bar? The last kind I bought only works some of the time, and it's embarrassing to have to wait for someone to get me in."

"Consider it done. I can tell that you use wards for security purposes. If you ever need assistance of this sort, you just tell me," I say, taking out my wand and conjuring a card.

I draw Shanti into a private corner and use my wand to conjure some soft light. "Feeling better?"

"I don't know how I feel, this is—not how I thought this evening was going to go. Was the play any good?"

"I have no idea. I was too busy worrying that you would stand up in the middle of it and slap me silly."

Her hand ventures towards the wand I still grip in my hand until I pull it away. "That's the most sensitive part of most wizards' anatomy, and they usually don't take kindly to it being handled."

"And what about you? Is it the most sensitive part of your anatomy?" Her eyes have recovered some of their playfulness.

"I can take it or leave it." She files away this new fact and thankfully doesn't react to the double entendre. "But if you tell anyone else that it could get me in a lot of trouble."

"I thought these were your friends?"

"You have a lot to learn about my world," I observe wryly. "Each one of these people has a hex on the tip of their tongues ready to utter it before someone does the same to them."

Shanti's hand trembles as it reaches for mine. "How can you just sit there so calmly, all of you? I don't know how to defend myself from this."

"Oh, no, Shanti-ma, don't worry, they would never hurt a muggle."

"A what?" She looks ready to cry.

"It's nothing to be concerned about, darling. My father was like you, we call them muggles, people who don't do magic. He and my mother have been gone since I was very young, but they were certainly not the first mixed marriage, as we call them."

Gregor the bartender comes over with the wine, which comes in a bottle with several necks, a special opener, and three very wide glasses like large champagne glasses. He's rightfully proud of sharing this fine drink.

"The lady is in for a treat. This is a very rare vintage made in the South Pacific by some extremely talented witches." He catches her panicked look. "I always test my products before serving them," he reassures her, though of course he does no such thing for the average customer. A magical person had better learn how to pick out poisons for himself, or a squib's word for it doesn't count for much.

The barkeeper lines up several clamps on the different corks, and little burrowing heads emerge to start drilling into the cork. Shanti claps her hands and the squib looks pleased.

Suddenly the openings begin to leak multi-colored fluid. "The trick is to let every color mix together. Otherwise you—" he leaves off as I hex him into silence with a movement of my hand under the table. "Otherwise you spoil the flavor," he says, shooting me a look for using magic against him. I didn't want him to tell her about the narrow path between a delicious drink and deadly toxin that so often exists in our magical realm.

He catches a little of the liquid and swishes it around in the glass. A flower begins to bloom out of the liquor.

"Oh!" Shanti says, grabbing my arm. "Julian!"

The bartender rips off a few of the tasty petals with his teeth. "Perfect. Enjoy, madame, monsieur."

I pour her glass and then mine, and we watch them bloom. Her face is childlike, ecstatic. "I don't know where to start."

"I don't either," I murmur before the enormity of the occasion, and lift my glass. To everything I can't tell you, to everything you will someday wish I hadn't told you, is my unspoken thought. "To magic."

Her white teeth tear off a couple petals from the blue side and she sucks in the nectar. Listening to the noise of delight she makes at the taste is enjoyment enough—drinking my own glass is merely an afterthought. The sweet petals dissolve on my tongue and I realize this is one of those rare elixirs that will get me a little drunk when, in answer to her gushing about nothing, I start to gush with her. We place petals on each other's tongues and greedily lick our lips.

"Is everything magic this wonderful?"

To avoid answering I dip my finger in the last of the liquid at the bottom of the glass and she licks it off. "What do we do now?"

"Thank you very much, Gregor," I say, making a princely sum appear in his pocket. "Thank you, Rebecca, Belda," I say to the women who explained some things about our world to Shanti.

"Get that license," Antoine orders.

Putting my arm around this small muggle who is, in the eyes of my society, my muggle, we exit out onto the street. Usually all of the transformations in my life don't bother me at all, but tonight, seeing the magical world through Shanti's eyes, or perhaps it's the liquor, makes the city look strange compared to what we just left.

"To think that just a few hours ago I was like them," she says, walking under my arm. "Everything is different than before."

"You'll find these two worlds may exist mostly in parallel, but they do tend to have their own routines," I say with my face buried in her dark curls. "Come, I want to show you something. Hold on to me as tight as you can." Taking advantage of one of the dark corners for a lift-off point, I shoot us into the air and fly above the rooftops until we can see the glittering traffic lights below. After a brief circle I set us down again.

"How many more things like this do you have to show me?" she says, wavering between exhilaration and exhaustion.

"More than I could possibly ever tell you. Let's take a taxi home." Before we climb in I turn to her. "What we just did is something very, very few people like me can do. Everyone can fly a broom, but flying without one is my secret. Please do not share this with anyone. I put myself in your hands."

I wish I could feel that what I was giving her was a gift. We sit very close inside the taxi and we are two children dwarfed by the reality of magic.

At her door we kiss for a long time. A knot that I thought was me is slipping loose like a thread of silk. Her mouth is taking me apart and leaving me in piles: my essential pieces, folding it like laundry that is very clean, dried in the sun and the wind.

She pulls back, giving me a look I'm so happy I don't have to fear if it's because she's seen my True Face. It's because she is a little drunk off magic, off of Blooming Wine. "Will you come in?"

"You have many things to think about tonight. And Blooming Wine is supposed to give wonderful dreams. As the saying goes, 'Take counsel of your pillow.' I would thank you for the chance to apparate behind your door, however."

She lets us in and collapses into a chair to watch me disappear.

Back at my apartment my sensor goes off to remind me to change forms. I almost don't want to leave behind the person who had such a strange and wonderful evening, but I don't like to work with my father's hands, and I need to think.

Years of my life, countless studies and troubles and risks have I devoted to Harry. Now he's across the channel, and it's like everything, even the messy trial and Voldemort, never happened. "Harry is my ex-lover," I experiment with saying aloud, but that sounds so clean, so easy. Would I still want to be with Shanti if Harry and I could touch each other without risk of bodily harm? But if he was happier with his young friends and I enjoy myself more with Shanti and my colleagues, what kept us together as long as we lasted in France? Sex?

Sex.

Being in bed with Harry is transcendent. It's like going back to the beginning of creation, rolling around in the primordial ooze together and crawling out, the first fish on land, afterwards. No one has ever taken me apart and put me back together like Harry does with his hands, his body.

But with Shanti I'm discovering that there are other pleasures besides getting that far into the depths. Why do I feel so guilty, then, thinking of Harry starting again in Britain? Harry is very attractive, and he's Harry Fucking Potter, he can get laid by batting his eyelashes, I reassure myself.

Why has the lingering taste of the Blooming Wine turned black in my throat?

_They see and hear within their own desires, which obstructs them from seeing and hearing God. Terrestrial and material things overshadow them, and they cannot see beyond their own human nature. If they would be still, desist from thinking and feeling with their own self-hood, subdue the self-will, enter into a state of resignation…_

_Jacob Boehme_

Sitting down to some of my notes, I try to work but the colors are swirling in front of my eyes at the same rate as my thoughts. Anouk hops over to me and answers my question about bird-messages from Harry—none have arrived. My hand puts down the muggle pen and summons my quill.

Dear Albus,

I remain convinced that with the knowledge I now have, being around Harry would be dangerous for his health and my good conscience. This does nothing to change the responsibility I feel for him on all the levels you are aware of, however. Good intelligence tells me he left for Britain some weeks ago, and I want to be assured that he has made a decent start at a new, hopefully more normal, life.

Am I right in thinking that anything I do, no matter how well-intentioned, at this point will just cause further pain for Harry?

PS. Do you need some more of that Rheuma-right salve for your knee?

Rather than making Anouk take such a long journey, I use James' old Fragmentus spell, knowing that Albus will get a kick out of it, and floo over to the grate in his office. Leaving the bits scattered on the floor, I wait for him to wake up and watch the pieces assemble into parchment.

My dear friend,

No, I have not heard from him, or any definite news of him, although someone in your—community—did say they had seen him in muggle London recently. You must know by now that my "wait and see" approach that has so frustrated you over the years is the only form of pragmatism I know: we simply cannot tell what the future holds for him, but we will know what we can do to help when we see the opportunity.

I know you have often disagreed with me on the subject of Harry, but believe me that I am sorry that there is no way for you to work things out, short of making a breakthrough in your studies, which I have always had faith would happen.

Ah James' spell! Harry was always more intuitive magically, more like Lilly than James in that respect. He focused so much on battle while he was with us that I often wonder what subjects he would have excelled in if he could have spared the attention. But then his visual art, particularly that three-dimensional project you told me about, make me think that perhaps he is like his father after all. And you say he made quick work of Herbert and Bandicoot, and I myself still don't understand sections of it.

Pop over sometime and we can catch up. I was most amused to hear about your musical debut, and believe I know a few more very old songs to add to your repertoire. Don't call too late, as you know I retire early. And yes, please do bring some of that salve, and the stuff for clear thinking, what is it? You see, my mind does wander sometimes.

Always here,

D—

Albus' response does not-self destruct after reading, but I always take the precaution to burn any of our correspondence. The brief, mad thought comes to me that Albus is the only family I have left, and maybe I should introduce Shanti to him. Bit by bit, Severus. The old man hasn't liked any of my romantic choices yet, and I don't know whether I would be insulted by how pleased he would be about a muggle (female!) partner, or if I'd be irritated by him finding some fault.

I'm so much more difficult in my normal form, is the thought I've had many times since I've been moving back and forth across the Julian/Severus line. Don't think of yourself as two different people, comes the next one. It's really you that is with her.

When I see Shanti at the Institute we both eye the new folding table as if weighing its sturdiness compared to the old one. I am melting into her. Everything is her. The orange color of the walls, the mandalas she instigated me to charm onto every surface, the smell of incense muddled with what I have come to recognize as muggle products for the skin. The look of concentration on her face when she is in the middle of a Reiki session, and then the different looks I can draw out of her face. The gladness, cunning curiosity, the desire.

What seems like the easiest thing I have ever done in bed becomes fraught with difficulty as we sleep.

Harry and I were probably the only two people in the world suited to sleep next to each other. He'd always suffered from nightmares, of course, and I know he had more than enough reasons to wake up shaking or shouting or punching me in the back. There was never any shame between Harry and me. That was the most wonderful thing about our relationship. When my own nightmares came, his warrior's reflexes had him summoning his wand before I could do him—or the building where we slept—any damage. If he wasn't so quick, and so accustomed to my magic, I could have thrown him across the room without even knowing it, thinking I was defending myself against the army of the dead that often came to exact a price from me in the dark. But just like Harry's touch melted through any transfiguration spell, it could instantly disarm the raw energy rolling off my side of the bed.

Where Shanti was immune to my magic-sucking constitution, however, she was not prepared to meet the challenge of a wizard with nightmares.

As I began to find new psychological footing after Harry's departure, my need to sleep returned to the 1-2 hours I had become accustomed to in recent years. Yet I still found it very peaceful lying next to Shanti, so I found myself lying with her and sleeping more than I needed, partially to keep from having to make up a reason for my apparent insomnia.

One night I was having one of my recurrent nightmares: all the people I had killed, and all those deaths I had adopted from Voldemort, were coming at me with tiny scissors, so that each could claim some kind of redress. All these hordes were directed by a giant version of my mother, whose head was lolling grotesquely as it did at the end, and whose words were mostly a garble of nonsense. The army of the dead knew what she wanted, however, which was to snip, snip, snip away at me until there was nothing left.

"No! Mother, no, tell them to stop!" Shanti told I was saying.

"Julian! Julian what do we do? I've never been in an earthquake!" It's the shaking bed, more than Shanti shaking my shoulder, that wakes me up.

The "earthquake" stops.

Shanti crawls out of bed to see if anything is damaged, and only finds a few glasses have fallen off a shelf.

Several neighbors are knocking on each others' doors to see what has happened and that everyone is all right.

Strangely, no one else in Paris reports an "earthquake." That night I inspect the building when everyone is asleep and repair a few hairline fractures in the foundation. Hermès Trismégiste! What if the whole thing had collapsed because of my past pursuing me!

I watch them that morning and walk around like someone is going to trace the tremors to me, but of course no one else could suspect that letting my bad dreams advance so far could have such dangerous consequences. Harry always smited me awake before I got to that point, it seems.

Thus, a new phobia of sleep is added to my long list of phobias.

But what am I to do when, after making love, Shanti twines herself around me and falls into a contented, warm slumber? We are in such harmony together I want to do what she does, so I find myself drifting. A few nights later, after I've taken a variant of Dreamless Sleep to control the nightmares, Shanti wakes me up in the morning with an unwelcome revelation.

"I had the strangest dream, my love! Normally I don't have vivid dreams like you do, but this seemed so real—so real I could feel it with my hands!"

"What did you dream, Shanti-ma?" I ask absently, because watching the Paris sunlight against the wall with her once the dangers of the night have passed and the dead have to wait until new dark is one of my new pleasures.

"I dreamt that I was surrounded by snakes, or ropes, I can't be sure. And they were everywhere, growing around me like vines and I couldn't get away. But I wasn't afraid. Isn't that odd? What do you think it means?"

"Ask one of your soothsayer friends," I say a bit sharply. "Forgive me, I think I had a nightmare myself but I can't remember it."

Actually, I relaxed into perfect Dreamless Sleep. A little too well.

Shanti thought she dreamt it, but actually she woke up to find herself entangled in my mass of hair.

It shouldn't have surprised me that my transfiguration wore off when I was under the influence of a potion. In fact, I loathe sleeping transfigured. It frightens me that I will lose track of my transfigured form, and it's just not as restful. Harry used to like sleeping with all of my hair as a sort of nervous system connecting us in our dreams. These days I don't really even have an opportunity to regain my normal form for longer than a minute or two in the bath, so I keep my hair in braids as a way of avoiding the time-consuming knots that would develop with even a few days' neglect.

Shanti is looking at me with concern. "I don't know how you even feel rested in the morning, Julian-ji. You talk constantly in languages I don't recognize, you plead and you shout."

One of the wonderful things about this muggle woman is that, curiosity or no curiosity, she knows when something is too terrible to be discussed. She can sense that my life is a delicate compromise, and if she were to open Bluebeard's cupboard it might threaten this new and wonderful thing we're discovering together.

My grandmother used to tell the story of Bluebeard as a cautionary tale about wizards marrying outside their kind—Bluebeard being a wizard, of course, and the muggle bride getting what she deserved for meddling with his cupboard of magical items.

And thus she gradually accepts that I will let her fall asleep in my arms and then retire to the parlor, where I will do my own work or apparate somewhere to do work in one of my laboratories—the one at the university or the one at the seaside.


	56. Chapter 56

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 56: The Ledger

_If we give the true faith out of our hand we will be without it; if God departs from  
>the soul, then will the evil spirits therein have free play.<em>

_Life and the Doctrines of Philippus Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim Known as Paracelsus by Franz Hartmann_

_Plague of Scrofulous Fugue Besets Wizarding World  
>Only Males Affected. Alkahest Link Alleged.<em>

I snort at the breakfast table, reading the story about another of my supposed exploits. Anouk chirps on her perch, wanting to know the joke.

"I could have told them weeks ago that there was a run on my stores of skin remedies ," I say to her, offering the plate with toast crumbs for her to peck. "And given the wizarding world's darker habits, I'm surprised all the men aren't walking around with the Fugue or droopy ears or any of the other less pleasant sequelae from the aphrodisiacs they guzzle."

"You mean wizards are just wandering the streets, not knowing who they are and scratching?" she asks, tittering at the idea.

"The bitch of it is, they can't even remember the good time they had," I laugh with her. "The eruptions will go on for weeks. They seem to have already discovered that despite their suspicions about The Alkahest's threat to the virtue of their men, no one's unguents will get rid of the inflammation so quickly, and without the bothersome blue lips other unguents cause."

"At least their wives or mistresses will remember," Anouk points out.

I take some sort of grim satisfaction out of the fact that such a great proportion of my orders for aphrodisiacs and their side effects come to me from Britain. Now that I've traveled and can declare that those wizards from my home country are so much more conflicted than elsewhere that I'm not surprised they need some help in order to act out their desires.

The days up until the end of the school year I remember as a string of Shanti's laughs like bright beads connecting the almost as bright solitary moments of research. Shanti's laugh is a new language, an animal that transcends taxonomy, a new Paracelsan trait of its own. When she laughs on the street, in a café or at the Institute, people look up, enchanted. Men are jealous of me for having this fiery apparition at my side, and I can't believe I'm there, myself.

Though it didn't seem possible at the beginning of my stay at the university, the school has let it be known that they have no intention of showing me the door any time soon. I've won some sort of award from the students, as a matter of fact. The dean of my faculty has even offered to supplement what my "anonymous donor" is paying for my research expenses if I agree to teach more classes to meet the demand.

When I owl Dumbledore with the news he gets a good chuckle out of my popularity as an instructor.

Shanti can't just leave her several Reiki practices to travel with me, as I would have liked, so I plan the absolute minimum of specimen-collecting time, with the rest of the summer dedicated to sampling as many muggles as possible.

We go to Gregor's frequently—she's charmed the barman into another one of her followers—and I find it easier to see the good side of my magical friends when she is by my side whispering her amusing comments. The one shadow that sometimes falls over our time is that I will occasionally catch Tristan's yellow signature from outside the bar.

"You know, darling, I don't think I actually want to sit inside tonight," I say on these occasions. "Let's go to someplace with outdoor seating," or "I just realized they are playing a film I wanted to see."

And because we are so intoxicated by each other's presence, it suits us just fine to be somewhere else for an evening, anywhere as long as I am held within her warmth.

The one time I saw Tristan on campus I couldn't maintain eye contact with him. The handsome, tawny-skinned features turned into a wall when he saw me. If I'd been alone, perhaps it would have been different—after all, my life has prepared me for others' judgment. But to be looked at as the blackguard that I am with Shanti on my arm—it was a dissonance I did not care to repeat.

Then one morning I was reading a several-days-old copy of the Prophet while sprawling on one of Shanti's cushions.

Ancient Staff-Skiver Stolen from Magical Museum!

I sat up straight and read the article again. Anyone who's been through a History of Magic course in the fifth form knows what a Skiver is—or was, since it hasn't been used for at least a century. It was a simple device, not truly magical. You could produce the same effect with a table saw. But it was one of the many curiosities the morbid and the schoolchildren in their fifth year paraded in front of to ooh and aah at a more violent time that has really never passed for our kind.

A skiver is a device of the exact right size for a wand, along with the wand-hand, to be fitted into the vise. Then one sliver is carved off the tip of the wood, at regular intervals until the supposed wrongdoer confesses or the torturer has had his sport.

Connected to the wand-hand as the instrument was, legend had it that the magic itself was drained with each slice. I'd like to see some documentation of this actually happening, but the power of suggestion was probably just as effective. Not being trained in wandless magic, the witch or wizard was helpless to cast any charm while immobilized, and thus prey to whatever else the torturer was doing to them while they panicked.

One can easily see the allure of such a machine for someone who had had his magic repeatedly drained by the lover that jilted him.

Harry was back to populating his Torture Room.

-

Dear Professor Dumbledore,

I've been avoiding writing you because it hurts me to admit that you're right. You were right all along—I'm so sick of feeling sick. When I'm away from Severus for a few days and the nosebleeds stop, I feel guilty, but it's good to be able to move around without bargaining with all my muscles to obey me. I remember you told me once that old age it like that—you realize you are a puppet monarch at the head of an increasingly divided kingdom. I do hope your subjects are more or less orderly.

I miss you, Dumbledore, Albus. I haven't always been kind, but I have understood—you know this about me. That what I observe very seldom makes it into words, but it's there all the same. I don't think either of my parents were that way, either. Don't ask me how I know. It's odd, to have spent my whole life retracing the steps of two dead people. Sometimes it's exhausting, carrying my parents. Or stultifying, being carried by them.

But I expect you understand that, too.

Is it your magic or some sort of sucking hole in your personality that makes you accept everything, just take it in like what muggle science calls a black hole, and you would call a Pernicious Sink? I mean no disrespect—it's just that it's a diabolical thing, your placidity, and all the muggle learning I've accumulated since leaving Hogwarts still can't explain it. Are you sure you aren't like Severus? The whole universal solvent idea, I mean. Except with Sev, if you're heavy like a stone he'll sink with you. With you, Professor, everything becomes as bland as spun Toffee-Silk. You see, I'm all the way in France and I still feel you calming me into forgetting what I wanted to ask.

After being so sick for so long, it's finally easy for me to see what would help me. I need to be away from here. There is no question of my finishing out the year and managing to avoid Severus, and as much as I hate to lose the credits, that makes staying out the semester a pointless exercise. So it's back to Muggle London, to my apartment, which I'm so grateful Sev insisted I keep. And then, who knows? The Ministry bothers me now that I know even the French magical authority is so much more liberal. How could I go back there and have them use me as some kind of proof that their bigotry is justified? Perhaps there is a better job you can think of? Lazing around with nothing to do isn't healthy for me. Any ideas you might have would be appreciated.

At any rate, I wanted to let you know that I am returning very shortly, just as soon as I can tie up some loose ends. Perhaps we can meet soon. There are several deadly sweet French bonbons I've had my eye on for you.

Your grateful friend,

H.P.

-

Dearest Harry,

I am delighted that you will be within visiting distance, though, since you have obviously guessed some things about my makeup, I must insist you grasp something commonly misunderstood about me—I take no pleasure in being right. If you and Severus together were sometimes difficult for me to grasp, it is because all deep passions are by their nature private and strange. And for someone long past his passionate years, even a peck on the cheek between completely inexperienced youngsters seems a little too messy.

You have surpassed my expectations for how well you adapted to France, so I have the utmost faith that you can re-establish yourself back in Britain with the greatest of ease. You are right, our magical community is a bit staid, but your generation is changing all of that. I hear Diagon Alley is no exception. Perhaps you would be so good as to run a few errands for me there and then stop by my cottage? Yes, I have definitively retired to a small dwelling on the outskirts of Hogsmeade, but that doesn't keep me out of the loop from all the scandals at the school. They still have me out to give a speech now and again, and really, what else did I do so well as speechifying?

Enclosed is the list of items. I could ask someone else, but you know how tiresome people can be when you ask them to obtain certain things. Since we are both adults, I'm sure you understand the need for discretion.

D—

-

Dear Harry,

It was so lovely to see you. Thank you for bringing everything I asked. The house elves can be so tedious in their objections to anything messy. As per our discussion, here are the list of books I thought you might find helpful. Your father would be very proud that you have read and assimilated Herbert and Bandicoot's Chimeric. He was the only one of his year to grasp the principle that consciousness can be to some extent predicted and made part of the equation of a charm. And you have just scratched the surface of what your abilities can accomplish in this arena, one of your many areas of skill.

Perhaps you and some of your other "disaffected youths" as you like to call them would care to come for a supper? It would do me good to see some of your progress. Hogwarts isn't what it used to be, and if it's not entirely my fault, I'd like to think it's because there hasn't been a new pedagogical idea among the faculty in three generations (with one notable exception). Perhaps your "club" can give a visiting demonstration, a sort of alumni evening, and we'll see how it goes over?

-

Dear Albus,

It felt strange to be back at school, but I was very proud to have something to say to that daunting collection of faces. You don't know what you're made of until you open your mouth before the specters of your childhood and see what comes out.

Minerva (it feels so strange to call her that!) always did have a soft spot for me, but I hope it's more than that, and that she likes the idea of magical study being at least somewhat informed by the realities of the muggle world. There are so many ideas that I can't claim as my own (although you and Merlin know I can't say who I got them from!) but exploring legillemency in relation to information science is a huge uncharted territory with some promise. After all, as some of the former Slytherins in my little band remind me, if we don't learn how to do magical hacking first, someone worse than us will have cornered that territory and it will take us much longer to catch up.

No one at Hogwarts seems to understand the first thing about Spagyrics, and I can only say I do because I lived them for several years of my life. Watching—him—do all of his tricks with potions and beetles was also a big part of it, but I find that since I don't have the feeling for the magical properties, I can only sometimes get the experiments to come out right. So we've been creating our own illustrations of the magical principles based upon our own experience.

We know, for instance, that Tristan (my French friend is here! He's only visiting) can do visual charms very well but not the more theoretical things that also interest me. So we repeat basic exercises and see who complements each other the best. It's a far, far more sensible way to approach education than the ridiculous house rivalry system. All that may have worked well in medieval times when wizards had to remain strong and unattached because of Goblin raids and threats from other species, but these days it only brings out the worst in children.

Now the situation we find ourselves in is that magic itself is being threatened. There are ever fewer Hippogriffs, and though the same number of children show up for their first summons at eleven, the graduating classes are smaller and smaller. If we simply teach children the old ways, there may not be anyone left to teach soon enough. Like any decadent class that protects its blood and its minds from new ideas, our hidebound magical society can't last forever this way. If I could tell—that bastard—that all of his eugenic ideas were the surest way to ruin for his beloved purebloods he would be apoplectic.

Sorry that I have gone on so long, old man. There is no one else I can talk to who is not afraid to acknowledge what I've been through, and doesn't see me as broken beyond repair. Since you have always been honest with me, I must know: is adulthood just one long process of trying to make things better so no one else has to suffer as you did?

I haven't had the time or attention to devote to my artwork recently, but I do plan on coming to visit at some point to do my portrait of you. (Don't even get me started on what's wrong with the one they put up when you left. Ghastly perspective).

Things are very busy here but I might have Tristan pop by with your ration of sweets so you can meet him. And none of that hinting you think is so subtle—he has a girlfriend!

-H

Harry,

Your friend was a most entertaining guest for tea, as I'm sure he told you. He is full of life and humor, and if you will excuse an old man's meddling, if he is truly set on that girlfriend then he is nevertheless exactly the sort of friend I think you need.

You have had sorrows beyond your years, and I don't think you allow yourself to enjoy life as you ought. Race your brooms over the Thames, the two of you, but laugh while you're doing it!

-

Dear Albus,

We've been working so hard I've scarcely had a moment to write, but you've been on my mind often as we put the finishing touches on our curriculum. I'm enclosing one of Tristan's drawings that will be used as the frontispiece to the series of books we have planned.

It seems like there's always a memory or two staring over my shoulder as I draft the texts or watch one of my partners practicing. There's one in particular that makes me think of you so clearly I can almost feel your beard tickling the top of my head.

It was second year. One of the Slytherin boys was doing something beastly—I can't remember what—and the worst of it was he was doing it over and over, invisibly, so that it looked like I was tripping over my feet or punching myself in the nose again and again. After being blamed for everything Dudley did my entire childhood, the worst part of it was people thinking I was doing something I wasn't.

It made me so angry that I set upon the first Slytherin who laughed at me the next time it happened in the middle of the crowded courtyard. "Tell me what the spell is! Or better yet, stop bloody casting it on me!" I was yelling while casting Disequilibrius on everyone wearing green.

It was a relief when they brought me to your office, because I didn't know how to back down without losing face.

"Mr. Potter, which sweet would you like?" you asked me. And when I chose a Chocolate Frog, you gave me two.

Surprised that I was being rewarded for fighting, I stared at the sweets in my hand.

"One for Harry, the boy who has been the victim of the Warp-Will jinx, whose antidote can be found in this book on the table, and one for the Boy Who Lived, who the rest of the school depends upon to do somewhat better than brawling at class change."

All it took was that acknowledgement that I was living out others' expectations in addition to my own concerns, and it set everything in my mind at ease. It wasn't hard to know which boy I was expected to be in any situation, and act accordingly most of the time.

After everything—Severus, the trial, everything—I thought people stopped expecting anything of me, and I was glad. Not happy that it took such an impact to smash their hopes for the Boy Who Lived, but happy to find these particular pieces of my life among the wreckage, no longer demanding anything.

When I began this school project I didn't really look for anything other than a reason to get together with other magical young people who were sick of our world but unable to live outside of it. Maybe I was trying to make my therapist happy, or make you proud, once things got going. But now I'm actually pleased to see my friends—who are all wicked talented in their own ways—checking on me out of the corner of their eyes, making sure I'm okay because they need me to be.

For them, the troubles with Voldemort might have taken family members lost to either violence or the Mark, but the real Boy Who Lived wasn't the stuff of legends they were told as a child. He was the man who had publicly lost his innocence and gone through some very bad times. The one who doesn't like to be touched and tears up at the sound of a bubbling cauldron. This was what I lived through, what I am still living through, and they depend upon me to show them that it is possible to survive the bitterness they all feel, for one reason or another, in a society that is anything but transparent.

Picturing you here with me makes me go on and on, Albus, because only you know that the pains I suffer are much more recent, and that Severus couldn't have hurt me this much if he didn't love me first.

The complete set of texts will be coming to you by owl post as soon as the exemplars are ready.

Good night from each of your Boys Who Lived,

H

-

One day I was mixing up a large batch of Skin-Stim in one cauldron, with another large batch of an aphrodisiac in another. Though I always enjoy being at my seaside home, it seems like I'm having to spend more time there than I would like. Setting up a similar laboratory in Paris would be impossible, and yet I wish Shanti and I could make things together in her vibrant, stuffed little flat.

I'm planning to surprise her with a fossilized fish skeleton I found on the beach today when I realize I'm almost out of some of my ingredients.

"That can't be. I just restocked my supply of beetles," I'm muttering when I open one of my cabinets. Organization has never been my strong point, so I throw canisters and boxes around for some minutes before I realize what I should have noticed months ago.

Though I make Polyjuice every single visit to keep up with the demand, there is none where it should be in my cupboard.

"That's impossible," I say to myself. It's not like I use the stuff myself, so it couldn't have gotten mixed in with my small store of potions I keep in Paris.

Setting the two spoons to keep a rhythmic stirring motion, I brew some tea and sit on a crate to try and retrace all the orders I've filled for the last six months. Stupidly, I keep no records, or if I did, they'd be lost in the box of ingredient invoices and other scrolls shoved in the bureau that doubles as an equipment cupboard. Making a half-hearted attempt to find the last shipment of raw materials I ordered, I come across some recent issues of the Prophet I brought with me to read while my potions brewed.

The Scrofulous Fugue epidemic headline catches my eye again.

Anyone could buy my potions—as long as you can owl me your requirements, I will fill your order, no questions asked. I must have thought so the first time I read the article.

But in light of my recent discovery that something is definitely off with my accounts, the news item takes on a new significance.

There's only one person who could get within a half-mile radius of my cottage, which I didn't even think to change the "locks" on as I did on my Paris apartment.

Harry has been "borrowing" potions from the seaside house.

And apparently sowing his wild oats with a wide selection of wizards.

In a fury, I tear out of the cottage and run out to the flock of birds gossiping outside.

"You mean you just let him take whatever he wanted?" I berate the gulls.

The way they all exchange knowing glances makes me furious.

"He said you would be upset if you knew how sick he was, so he was taking things to make him feel better," says one gull.

"You would hide this from me? Let him harm himself with an overdose? He has no idea what he's doing when it comes to potions!"

"He just said that you would have one of your fits," answers another bird.

"He did, did he? And how did you have this conversation about my ways?"

"He drew pictures and acted it out," one gull finally says and makes a big show of cleaning its feathers.

"And how long have you all been keeping this from me?"

"You know we don't keep time the way you do. Ever since he started coming here. You said he was your life-mate, so of course we thought he had the run of your house."

All along. He's had other agendas all along. Now that my mental accounting ledger has finally caught up to reality, I realize just how skewed my potions activities have been for a long while. Harry has been taking Polyjuice and some of the rarest and most dangerous aphrodisiacs for months, along with somnolents and other intoxicants. His novice's reaction to our Christmas China Cheer spree might have been an elaborate charade. Just like Harry's portrayal of the partner devoted to the point of jealousy.

Hermès! What sort of bacchanalia is he engaging in with the sort of people who share in his darker tastes? All triggered by, and now I see, enabled by, me.

How could I not have noticed that it was harder to keep up with the orders than it should have been? I enjoyed the work so much, needed to be my real self with the hands of genius to make up for my lack of wisdom, that it didn't occur to me to check my inventory. Merlin himself couldn't get through the wards protecting this two-mile stretch of abandoned beach.

Dismantling all the wards that had our combined magical signatures braided into their logic, I can see the glittering bits of spells with their sheen of love blow away in the wind and wash into the sea.

Somewhere in that all-encompassing water, the memory of us Harry and me together swims intact like the last exemplar of a fish too beautiful to survive.

Re-warding the house and the beach to my solitary imprint makes me feel the ache of solitude such as I haven't since my early years at Hogwarts. I am alone in my magic.

I stand with my feet in the surf, the birds wheeling overhead trying to distract me with their songs. But I think of all the hidden life in the depths, catch murmurs of conversations between whales and think of my own depths. The whales, the huge hulking creatures in me I understand even less. My sea is made up of the blood of a thousand muggles and half-bloods killed by Voldemort, along with and the magic of dozens of victims preyed upon by my deadly sex and killed by design or accident.

Out of this immense ocean of foreign magics and life-forces, what is "I", this tiny I that watches and repents and desires? The rest of it, the dead and the drained, they are in conformity with their situation. There is a grace about all the vanished faces that swim through my huge power. It is me, Severus Snape, the homunculus at the center of this damned enterprise, that has the gall to fight against it, one minnow swimming against the stream of ruin.

"No," squeaks this little mote, "No! I shan't be a monster! I won't stand for the steady diet of depravity that has been good enough to sustain me all these years. I won't watch my lover descend into his own private depths, to which I gave him the first push long ago. I want what is easy. I want to go to sleep with Shanti and wake up with her in my arms, at last seeing what it is like to be good. To be right in the middle of unguarded life and not made to stand to the side or wait for the scraps or lash it to the chair so it doesn't fall face-first into its gruel. Or ask permission or—"

Lessmore learned the lesson from me. How could I have forgotten it?

If magic needs somewhere to go or the consequences can be severe, love, swallowed, is even worse.

Can I blame Harry for sifting through England's wizardly offerings, searching for someone to love?  
>It would be easy to be carried out into the realm of the dolphins, but that little motor inside of the errant fish that is me hasn't run out. My feet walk of their own volition through the stony surf a mile away, and by the time I turn around I know what I must do.<p>

When I return to the house I tear everything apart until all recent issues of the Prophet are assembled before me.

_"The Alkahest Returns to His Depravity—Adds Torture, Murder to his Résumé. Ministry Probe into the Circumstances of His Release."_

_The remains of one of the Alkahest's signature disappearing labels have been unearthed near three of the recent crime scenes where top Ministry figures were discovered bound and Obliviated. Signs of torture of a sexual nature have also been found on the wizards' persons. Men are urged to avoid solitary travel. Possible prophylaxis by disguising as females being explored._

At this point I sit back and take a nip of a calming potion, somewhat reassured. I sell my dubious compounds to most of Europe. There's no way to determine exactly which wizard or wizards are doing these things. The Alkahest is merely a useful cover for hiding the Incongruencies of many deviant wizards.

The labels are too much of a coincidence, however. A scenario unfolds before me that I can picture Harry doing. Perhaps one of my labels was found at the scene of a crime, and he took a fistful of labels and spread them around the places where the depraved seek their pleasures. He was angry enough with me that the headlines must have felt like justice—it was a revenge that just got away with itself. Yes, the Alkahest is a dangerous pervert. I ruined his life, so why shouldn't I be called a murderer? I broke his heart, therefore I have earned the title of torturer.

The headlines felt right to me when I looked at them.

_Ministry Official Found Dead, Disfigured  
>Showing that the Alkahest is descending further into the Blackest of Black Magic, his most recent victim has been found dead and with unspecified disfiguring injuries to the face, possibly caused by the improper use of a transfiguration potion.<em>

_Apothecary's Remains Hidden Among Inventory_

_This is the most grisly in the recent spate of attacks upon the flower of our Wizarding World's manhood. The previous crimes at least left the deceased in possession of most of their bodies, but we can only hope that the last moments Josiah Helmhurst spent on this earth were with his body still intact. Aurors discovered the apothecary's remains within the flasks and jars of his potions for sale._

When I finally apparate back to Paris, I've managed to calm myself somewhat.

Harry has unquestionably been stealing from me, but he can't know anything about these crimes, or he would certainly have reported what he knew, bad feelings about the Ministry or no. His sense of right and wrong has always been much sharper than mine.

He's heard me talk about Cimarron Nonesuch salt, and how murderers have to essentially re-learn how to cast spells or make potions unless they know how to neutralize the Harrowing Fire. I was still using it occasionally at the time he came back into my life. Harry once watched me clean up after an explosion caused by too much force igniting a potion in my cauldron.

If he'd stolen Cimarron salt, I would know. It's the one substance I'm hyper-aware of using. But none is missing—the canister is even a little dusty. And needless to say, the salt is monitored by the ministry. Someone like me, who has contacts in the magical underworld going back thirty years, I have no trouble obtaining it. Someone like Harry—the Boy Who Lived, no less!—would never be able to buy the stuff without a scandal.

You don't need Cimarron salt if you don't have Reaper's Reward, I tell myself as I apparate into Shanti's bedroom and slip into her arms.

But not using Cimarron salt doesn't mean you haven't gone through the Harrowing Fire as murderers and marauders have.

It took me a stupidly long time to understand this paradox and how it was manifesting in Harry.


	57. Chapter 57

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 57: Invention

During my travels to collect specimens over the summer, and sometimes while I am by Shanti's side at one of the muggle functions that are beginning to annoy me slightly less, a part of my mind is considering.

It takes me weeks—a half-thought here, a half-thought there. It shows itself sometimes like a half-buried ship in the deep of Rukmini's mind.

Then one day I find myself explaining to her:

Magical history is full of examples of creatures with more than one nature, in better or worse harmony. There's the werewolf as one type of acquired double nature. The gryphon, the basilisk, those type of beings are for all intents and purposes one body with an unusual mixture of qualities, but then there are the magicians who have agreed to graft another's nature onto them—usually for the sake of power—or whose own nature splits into one or more fragments—usually signaling an overall unsound constitution.

Although legend has it that in one case, a great wizard named Archibald Bastinoff maintained three separate magical personalities, each with their own strengths, weakenesses and wand, until the end of his days. This occurred after being targeted by an Elvin curse that made him, in his totality, a marked man within any magical territory.

Whether Bastinoff consciously responded to a threat by splitting himself is unknown. As I say, usually these things only happen for personal gain or because the wizard or witch has an innate or acquired fissure in their makeup.

If I had another lifetime free of distraction, I should like nothing better than to study such matters.

Even if I had been interested in Harry's activities after we went our separate ways, it may have been impossible, even for me, to detect that some part of Harry's being was otherwise engaged. Regardless, I would have been too busy being pained at the resourceful young leader Harry became as soon as he was recovered from my unhealthy influence. "The Boy Who Lived—Twice Over" would have been the thought bitterly recurring in my mind.

Harry's right—I'm not a fraction of what I could be if I'd only stop wasting my energy on guilt.

There was none of that in Harry's actions transmitted to me by Dumbledore's letters.

But I had to see for myself.

Using the dream-floo network, I find a bright knot of assorted magics on England's magical grid. One purple stain confirms that this is the group that Harry started, but he is absent for this meeting.

These are the people who know Harry best. I distribute myself like a mist through the group's minds. None of them, not one, sense anything other than a focused, gifted instructor with just enough of a grudge against the establishment to make him work to change it. And there are very gifted young people, among them a young woman who has some sense of magical personality, though she is completely without formation and only has a shadowy instinct that helps her Sort people into the most productive pairings.

Not even her. They all have identical images of Harry casting the same spells with the same wand every day. None of them seems to have the slightest inkling that I am there, indicating that their activities don't include Occlumency and Legilimency as such. One shudders to think what the unsuspecting student might have stumbled into, had he or she been paired with Harry in such an exercise.

Most likely because the Ministry had a fit about the idea of allowing these dark and disused magics to be included in any curriculum. Maybe if the Ministry's policies weren't always exactly the opposite of what they should be, Harry's activities would have been revealed much earlier in such an exercise.

There might be more to the Ministry than the lies they let the newspaper circulate about the Alkahest's supposed affinity for making cauldrons crack. But if they were making their own inquiries, they were doing a very poor job of it. I suppose because they were looking for me.

Since no one actually wanted to be the one to find me, and risk being eaten or magically digested or however you conceive of my rare Gift, it's understandable that they didn't find me where I was some of the time, mixing up the rare aphrodisiacs and intoxicants they bought at astronomical prices, on the coast of France.

I finish up my mental excursion in the English night by visiting some of the known dens of perversion—places where Harry might put all those stolen aphrodisiacs to good use. I don't see him but I see enough to ignite my darkest imaginations. Lying on my side with my front pressed up against Shanti's back, dreaming, I must have been gripping her uncomfortably hard, because she shakes me awake.

"Is something the matter, Julian?"

Before I can stop it, that laugh is coming out of my mouth. The one that is complete helplessness to express something. It's an unattractive sound and I don't like it here, slipping in between our sheets and getting close to her skin.

The shape of my mouth changes. "I, I," nothing more will come out. I swear it. If I could have known where to begin to explain, I might have tried it.

I might have risked being here in her bed, our bed, her eyes sweeping across my face in concern, her hand in the hairs at the nape of my neck.

She lets me bury my face in the curve of her shoulder, one of my favorite places on her body that I now sense could be taken from me by some unknown evil mechanism.

You can't decide for him. He's a grown man. If he wants to have ugly sex with similarly inclined men, you can't stop him.

Shanti anoints my forehead with every unguent she can find until my face is a runny mess of colored pastes and tears, but only until I wear myself out do I fall asleep with my head in her lap, a fistful of her gown in my hand.

With my eyes closed I trace Harry's magical signature with more focus—I've not been trying hard enough because it hurts me to navigate this space we used to think of as ours, trying to find him uninvited. I am confused and almost disappointed when I find him so vibrant, dreaming about building schools that tower higher and stronger than Hogwarts. If he catches a glimpse of me through one of the windows, he turns his back quickly enough that we don't have a confrontation. He must be used to avoiding me. I'm glad that he is able to do so.

I spend several nights checking in on him, as much as I dare without arousing suspicion. His dreams are different than I remember. More active, obviously thoughts and plans from the day. He is happy.

Too happy.

It strikes me one night—no one's dreams are this orderly. It's just not possible for all the anguish that Harry has lived through to not seep through at least occasionally in his dreams. There was a spectacular lack of Voldemort, of me, of the death of his parents. There was no pain. No depth. Just plans built on the air. Children laughing on the grounds with no substance to their happiness.

How would I have found the channel to where his other dreams and impulses were boiling like the noxious potion that they were? Could Harry himself have even gotten there consciously? Where was the black river that was making this overly clear stream possible?

Perhaps I was that channel. That misery that gave him back to himself.

Then one night, Harry is not in his bed.

My mind sifts through the English landscape and only finds a drop of purple at intervals. It is enough to lead me to an abandoned warehouse near where one of the bodies was found. Mentally my skin rises up in gooseflesh, remembering its own passage through the Harrowing Fire.

A Ministry guard is patrolling quite a few yards away. Wary of any Legillimency training he may of received, my presence moves carefully past the dust that has a few flecks of humanity left in it.

The blood and other fluids are all that was left behind by some ill-starred man. This one must have been the very young one reported in the papers, a wizarding university student on holiday from school in Hungary.

It closes around my throat like a velvet glove. Purple-pink mixed with something black and viscous. A bright butterfly struggling to stay aloft with tar on its wings.

Harry.

I shrink back, afraid that he will sense me, but he is standing half-covered with the Invisibility Cloak, just looking intently at a spatter pattern on the ground.

The pieces of a truth I should have seen long ago hit me with stinging force, assembling themselves in a picture that makes as much horrible sense as the drops of blood on cement are making to Harry.

They are the footprints of some deadly minuet he walked himself.

His features, however, make little sense to me, as if they've been jumbled and put back together wrong. They look—ordinary.

My consciousness shoots out into the black sky, and I hover there a while, drinking in the blankness.

I have to trap him in this other state. Otherwise no one will believe me and Veritaserum might not draw the truth out of him—both of his selves.

While Harry is away, I flit to his apartment and reach out with my mind to spend some time with his new computer. He has done a few technical things I don't understand, but the effect is to make it seem like his neighbor's online activities run to the extremely unsavory end of gay bdsm. I'm able to trace some of the activity to a message board where wizards (or people doing an extremely good job at pretending to be wizards) share their dark fantasies in the post-Voldemort era.

What is it in us that makes us invent the tortures when no one is willing to provide them?

Perhaps that's all Voldemort was. The collective unconscious of the wizarding world, rising to fill a need that is much more frightening because it is innate, though it takes different form in each age. In the recent past, one Tom Riddle rose to the challenge. In other ages, our magical world has nearly destroyed itself in any number of ways. If the Daily Prophet had its way, everyone would ward their doors and hex the first person who tried to say hello in the morning. Mutual suspicion is always a danger with our kind.

Posted by: DarkLord675

And this time I leave off the Petrificus because I want to see you squirm, want to see you try and crawl away so I can haul you back by your heels. But you are such a broken rubbish of a wizard you don't even think to run, much less spell yourself away.

I remove Silencius from your ragged lips and the first thing that this quivering beast you have revealed yourself to be quavers out is—"Please, master, more, please. Beat me worse than a house elf and I'll still serve you loyally." And then I try to thrash you from my sight as the traitor to our kind that you are.

But quick as a Winnow-Serpent you insinutate yourself among the folds of my robes and latch on to my boot. "Make me your familiar, make me the target of your wand's sport."

In order to rid myself of the aberration clinging to my garments I toss you a crumb from the cake you hunger for. "There, you, denude yourself and crouch, ready for what I care to give you."

The first lash of the Flagellus spell makes no mark but you gibber like a little witch all the same. The second raises a fine stripe on your backside. The third, the fourth, I lose count until you finally turn towards the front. But I will not give you the satisfaction you crave on this remnant of flesh, the useless wand you have left after I divested you of the true stick of your manhood.

Then I turn my back and leave you, mincing like a muggle who has indulged his unnatural tastes all night, to walk home like the unmagical creature you are.

Message from DarkLord675 to user hexmehard:

You seem like you know what you want, but do you think you can handle actually getting it?

I can make you beg for what you want, and even what you don't want.

Message to DarkLord675 from user hexmehard:

I'm intrigued. Your posts have always excited me, but the idea of actually meeting you is too good to pass up.

While I've still got my wits about me (are you as sexy in person as I imagine you to be?), let's have some ground rules:

None of the Forbidden Curses (not much sexy about Cruciatus, at least to my mind)

No photographs, muggle or magical

I'll have a potion or two on hand to help get me over the worst of your "ministrations"

Where and when shall we meet?

Message from DarkLord675 to user hexmehard:

Please. The Forbiddens are for people with no imagination. It means more to have someone find your weakest point and spring the hidden clasp to reveal the soft, mewling little creature you really are.

I'll arrange your portkey to be waiting at a secure location. (I may invite you into my lair, but you won't learn the way to get back there unless you prove yourself worthy).

Message from user smite_me to DarkLord675:

Your posts are always so hot. I wish I had your imagination. I like to have someone imagine for me, set the rules of the game as it were. These profiles tell you everything about my body but nothing about my mind. I'm a historian, and I just love the way you bring to life the things I already know about our darker magical past.

When shall we meet?

Message from user stupefied to DarkLord675:

Ever since I was a teenager I've been dreaming of meeting a wizard who could dominate me the way I know you can. You seem to be able to read my mind, to know how frustrated I feel some days having to pretend I know what I'm doing and that all this magic really has anything to do with me at all. Give me something to think about when I'm playing at being a strong wizard. Give me a scar or two to finger under my robe.

These so-called fantasies are a mixture of the banal and the disgusting, and Harry, my dear Harry, has them all rapt with attention at the way he can stew it all and serve it up with just the right perversion.

He's privileged in that sense. No one has a better understanding of a Dark Wizard's perversions to draw from.

He has no master plan. He's just instinct divorced from reason. Not like Riddle, not like…

Why has he started killing them, then? Why not leave them to their Scrofulous Fugue, which is no doubt brought on by whatever spells and potentiating ingredients he's adding in to the already strong aphrodisiacs and somnolents?

Is it terrible that some part of me is dreadfully flattered that he did pay attention all those hours spent in the laboratory together?

I'm almost proud.

Except that it adds another weight to my conscience that he's using potions for purposes I would never have agreed to.

After all, I'll drink the magic or the life out of someone with my penis, but one has to draw the line at outright torture. My victims died in ecstasy, no chemicals needed.

My eyes open on a late morning in Paris. Shanti let me sleep, not knowing that I just came in from my nighttime investigations right before dawn. When Shanti reaches for my hand over lunch I flinch. All of Severus' power to hurt is just on the other side of a reshuffling of my cells. How can I think I can keep her life from being shattered by this proximity?

"You are being beastly to yourself today, I see," she points out. "Whatever bitterness you are nursing inside of you, it can't possibly be worth spoiling a lovely lunch with me."

She holds up a piece of pear and feeds it to me. The perfect French afternoon turns black in my mouth.

"Dear Rukmini," I say into the mind of her comatose cousin later on. "I wonder do you hear me at night when I talk to you sometimes? I have no one else. There's Albus, of course, but his letters have been distant and I sense he can't have his loyalties divided between Harry and me, and Harry needs him so much more. If you ever wake, will you tell Shanti that I'm the monster who has been whispering the most dreadful secrets in your ear all this time? I've put images of my true form into your mind; you know what I am. Perhaps I've not been able to help you because I depend too much upon your captive audience. One day you will rise and point your finger at the half a man who has been masquerading as a whole, making love as a whole."

I've tried to tell Shanti. She doesn't know how many times my mouth has opened and then shut again. It's too much to risk. For both of us. What would the wizarding world do to her, completely helpless as she is, in order to get back at me, to control me? Harry, drained of his power, was never so exposed as Shanti, who doesn't even understand how a wand works or what the weak points of a spell are. Whenever I see her watching with rapt attention at the club while someone charms a new piece of music on the invisible orchestra, I wish she never even knew this was possible. But I can't tell her all the reasons to fear, because without her being able to ward off danger, it will only spoil her life needlessly.

"Julian. You do not seem interested in food anymore. I thought you would be happy to learn the recipe of my coconut curry," she complains as I chop the chiles mechanically. Inside my father's hands my own discolored potionmaster's fingers are itching for work.

"The research is not going as quickly as I would like," I say, retreating to one of the many worries she can understand. It's true that I've been losing weight. It's as though my true gaunt features are trying to hew their way through this other man's face after all.

"But you tell me this three times a week, and yet the board has renewed your grant."

She doesn't know that the "board" is actually a private fund set up by me and Harry, and I don't feel good about using it, any more than I think Harry would once he remembers it.

"Shanti," I fuss with her hair a moment before looking in her eyes. The garlic and spices float in the air between us, ready to turn into a stinging misunderstanding. "I must go away for a little while."

Please slap me and we will shout and make love, I beg her silently.

She drives the knife she's been holding into the cutting board. "You didn't decide this today, or yesterday, or even last week. You've been thinking about it for some time."

"Until I was able to get coverage for my classes next term, it wasn't even settled. It turns out that there is someone who is more than happy to take over the history of science, and a woman who would be perfect to teach a course on occultism in European culture —these people work for the Ministry, so there will be no question of giving too much away…"

"You think I am a fool."

The sound of her grinding teeth rises above the sizzling of the oil and I fear they will break.

"This is not about your precious world. You can't distract me any longer with your conjuring tricks. Some things you can't make disappear, or change shape, or make play Beethoven's Ninth. This is about sex. The kind of sex you like."

Something deep inside me quivers.

"Have you been in touch with him ever since you supposedly broke up?" Angry tears are coursing down her face, and when she rubs her eyes she gets the curry ingredients inside. Then she's sticking her head under the sink washing her eyes and cursing at me with her eyelids pushed back over her eyeball.

"You get inside of me, Julian, I let you inside of me, and see what happens. You hurt me. You hurt me in a stupid way. Was I an experiment? Were you going to take me home to your family and prove you could be with a woman?"

"My family is dead," I say.

"So that much is true? What else have you lied about to me? Was this a lie?" she grabs each of our crotches in her hands.

"I don't want to go, Shanti," I say as calmly as I can. "He's in some trouble and I'm the only one that can help."

"And what about his family? Are they dead too? Why are you the only one who has to leave his work and his position and his lover? To do what? Touch him and make it better?"

"Actually that never made it better. And yes, his family is dead." The ones that could help him, at least.

"What's the matter with you people? You can do anything, almost anything you want, things that the rest of us couldn't dream of, but you can't stop tripping over your own feet and cutting off your nose to spite your face." I'm walking toward her now and she's flapping her hands to keep me away. "Did you think of him in my arms? Did you ever feel a thing when I touched you?"

"Shanti, stop it. You don't know what you're talking about. I love you and have meant every touch that we've shared. I've been struggling because I didn't want to leave, everything in me wants to stay."

"What? What is it then? Why are you running after this supposedly ex-lover when we're supposed to be making dinner?"

She turns her back to blow her nose on her apron.

When she turns around I am gone. It must be in violation of some wizarding etiquette no one bothered to teach me, but I'm sure that muggle manners dictate that you don't apparate in the middle of an argument.

It takes me only a few minutes in my apartment to gather what I need and shrink it down to size, and to let Anouk out.

"Where are you going?" she asks.

"This is the end of my life in Paris, I'm afraid. Jail is the best case scenario, at this point. Try the zoological gardens if you get hungry or bored," I advise her. "You've been a true friend."

She considers me for a moment, but emotion is impossible to hide in the bird language. Anouk takes refuge into the night and I apparate soon afterwards.

A stop at my cottage has all of my bird friends backing away as soon as they see me.

"You know how he gets," one of the kestrels whispers to another as they all fly off, beating the black night air with their wings.

I inhale one last breath of salty air and disappear again.

When I inhale, it is a new air.

Intoxication without joy. Lewdness without sensuality. Food without flavor.

Aaah. England.

Like all my other abandoned homes, I had hoped to have left you behind for good.

No one knows my father's face anymore. No one that would be looking for it at this age, at any rate. The only one who could possibly give me away is Harry.

I'm entirely in his hands.

This is the way it should have been all along.

But not yet.

I walk down the London street and find a barber shop.

After going in and inquiring the price for a trim, I emerge with the hair of a relatively attractive young man about Harry's age. In a few moments, my ultra-potent Polyjuice does its work, though I have an IV hooked up inside my vest to keep the supply going and prevent any flicker. Harry could have walked into any barber and done exactly the same, so the possibilities are endless. Except I can feel him, which leads me the meeting place for his group easily enough.

I trace his steps to his apartment, where there seems to be no unusual magical expenditure at all. Locate his gym. The bakery where we used to take turns getting fresh bread in the morning gives me pause. The restaurant he took me to on our first night together. There are plenty of magical signatures along with his traces, but no one stands out.

I don't know whether to be glad for any potential lover's sake, or regretful that he wasn't able to find someone to regularly channel his desires into.

Who else but me? No one else could understand. Could let him toe the edge without going over. No one else could join him in the black waters and come out clean again.

No one else has left him paralyzed after too much intimacy, either. I wonder if he'd be as enthused about risking lung failure after everything that has happened.

There's nothing else but the computer left.

I buy a cup of tea nearby and chase the hot black thread.

This dark eloquence unfurling where he always hated writing before…

There is an agreement to meet with a new man.

But there are no instructions.

The details must be exchanged by owl. Some mercenary owl that can't be traced to Harry, as Hedwig would have certainly found a way to let me know something was amiss.

Where he keeps this owl is unknown.

That his other personality would be so resourceful frightens me.

I rent a room in a muggle hotel not far away from his apartment and concentrate.

His most recent magical trail goes dead in his kitchen. He either apparated or shifted. My mind spreads out to search for him all over England, but it's a tall order even if I were looking for the signature I know. This is Harry-but-not-Harry. My awareness is flying over magical grids glittering like cities below, the essence of my former lover conjured to the tip of my tongue for reference.

So you know it's me.

Since about 15 minutes ago when I had someone to show off.

Is France far enough away?

Sometimes, when you're not being tiresome.

This is happiness.

And the first sentence he learned the day we decided to go to France, repeating it over and over with the Rosetta ring to surprise me:

Que mes baisers soient les mots d'amour que je ne te dis pas.

Let my kisses be the words of love that I don't say.

Nothing. There is nothing of Harry here. Never has the night seemed so dark to me without that purple-pink flutter.

All of the other magic shines far away. They would never let the Alkahest get near them, if they had a choice. The dream level feels cold. This is what the world is like when the darkness in him wins.

It is getting light and I'm unusually weary, so I allow myself a few hours' sleep before going on my grand tour of England's Wizardly madhouses.

Then I get up and attach the intravenous Polyjuice system before leaving the muggle hotel.

The sale of Polyjuice is controlled for many reasons. Firstly, any society depends on a general correlation between a person and the face he or she is wearing. Wizards and witches who can transfigure to resemble other humans, as I do, are very rare, and those who can maintain that form are rarer still. It's a good job that anyone from Hogwarts can attest to my shoddy transfiguration skills, or there would be mass hysteria while Britain tried to flush out the hidden Alkahest in their midst.

Polyjuice is also extremely hard on the body, even my gentler and more potent brew, which is one of the most expensive offerings in my little shop. There are a few secrets to what makes mine so much better than the uncontrolled swill you can buy from your friendly black-market chemist. The potentiating ingredient, Ineffable Yew, does its job best when it is added right after the reveal but before the potion has cooled, though adding a few drops to brewed polyjuice will still extend its half-life as much as several hours.

The smoother transformation experience, with the barest minimum of flicker, is achieved by infusing the volatile magic of a Bragbeak Buzzard's wingfeathers with the sealing power of a Drowsing Worm's tail. As I've known since I was a child, the Drowsing worm may be rare, and even more rarely handled correctly, but the buzzard's feathers are simply no good if not freely given by the bird. The clutch of birds I know of in Brittany gives me anything I like, along with commiserating comments about our miseralble resemblance.

What other adept can talk their way into an unlimited supply from the notoriously reticent species?

Without all of these advantages, I wouldn't have access to a working brew at all, because something about my system just burns it up. Harry stole quite a bit of my concoction, but that plus his knowledge about the Ineffable Yew still wouldn't have lasted this long. So I'm off to see how well the Ministry polices controlled substances in their hospital apothecaries. Those suffering from identity disorders are occasionally brought back to themselves with a judiciously administered treatment of the identity-shifting potion. It's a fragment of the legacy of the Great Physick, this medicinal use of Polyjuice: like cures like.

Despite my positive experience with a Mantis Moth, and being one of the few people to walk out of a wizarding asylum, I can't bear either the smell of a mental hospital or the oily sheen left by a moth's busy little legs. One brushes by me as soon as I walk up to the admitting chamber of Boniface the Believer, and it's all I can do not to retch.

"Hello, I'm looking for a relative," I say in a friendly tone using the Welsh accent I've been affecting with the disguise. The young nurse looks glad of the distraction. An orderly is trying spell after spell to bring back a door that seems to have disappeared overnight. Droves of bland-looking food in waxed-paper containers hover patiently waiting to get into the patients' room.

"If they're in the east wing, you may have come on the wrong day," she says tiredly.

While I give her several spellings of a false name and then inquire about other hospitals where my fictitious relative might be, my mind is scouring the magical grid in the hospital. The apothecary is usually located in the basement or some other reinforced place to make it easier to weave the warding magic into the foundation. After a moment I locate it, but keep talking with the nurse about the hazards of working in such an environment. I'm still using the hair of the good-looking young man in my Polyjuice, and she thinks I'm flirting with her.

"Has your uncle been ill for long?" she is asking, and I've noted a breach in their wards from several weeks ago, too faint to track. But if he's hit one hospital, he's doubtless hit another.

Smiling, I thank the young woman, who resignedly returns to her work, and as soon as I'm out of site, I apparate to the next hospital on my list, Erstwhile Pickerell, which is near York.


	58. Chapter 58

The Pelican's Bequest 2 / Chapter 58: Whither-So-Well

After checking my Polyjuice container I approach the hospital, which I could locate blindfolded by the crawling sensation on my scalp it gives me a hundred yards away.

The receptionist is busy helping a despairing looking couple determine when their daughter left, when a voice echoes in my mind.

"Ask for Berthe Victoire," commands the voice. "Do it or I'll tell them who you are."

The words come in a combination of Basque, Ancient Gaelic and Mandarin.

"Good morning, do you have a patient named Berthe Victoire?" I ask in my best friendly manner.

"It's not visiting hours—are you a relative?" the middle-aged nurse says as if determined not to be helpful.

"Yes, yes I am," I say. "I won't stay long, but it's been such a long time."

She relents under my most pleasant barrage of magic.

Following the nurse's directions, I end up in a large pavilion. The sort I would have been in if I didn't have friends making sure I didn't, and of course, if I wasn't contagious. Everyone is clean and well-fed, and the only restraints used are the sort that bound me—magical bonds that keep the person suspended in a bubble with limbs hanging naturally, turning them gently to keep the circulation going. It's not unpleasant, really, but looking at a few dozen people suspended in their private worlds while the rest play cards according to completely fictitious rules is less than comforting, even for someone who's been there.

It must have hurt Adele to end up exactly where her mad sister avoided going, I'm thinking, wondering how strong the taint of madness is in our family.

"Over here, stupid boy," Adele says and I see her, rocking in a rocking chair, a mess of yarn on her lap. Does she really knit? I think stupidly while my eyes are transfixed by her palsy again. When I look up to her face it is the same—gray-haired, more raw-boned, more brutal, but still the same features of a stalactite. Still her hideous hands with their unceasing movements.

Bless her.

As always, nothing gets by her, and she allows her present ugliness to be compared to that of 25 years ago. When she judges me finished, she spits out, beginning in Basque but moving seamlessly to other languages. "I wonder how favorably you'd measure up after all this time, but then, you can't show your face in the whole of Britain, now, can you?"

"I thought you were dead," I answer in whatever language comes out.

"I've done nothing to discourage that notion," she says, unperturbed. "For many years I was overseas teaching—ever since you ruined the family name, it seemed like the only sensible option."

"The world's children are the richer for it, I'm sure," I drawl. "So you're mad, then?" I continue conversationally.

She cackles. "You had a nice long stay in an asylum, which surprised exactly no one in the family. But no, that is one curse I seem to have escaped."

Raising my eyebrows I take in our surroundings. "Only a madwoman would consent to be in such a place without being mad."

Ignoring me, she gets a crafty look on her face. "Let me see what you really look like."

What's the harm? The old bat is interned. Probably half the patients have Alkahest sightings. "Very well," I say and force myself to shift into my regular form, but what comes out instead by force of habit is Julian.

"Oh, oh-ho-ho." She's doubled over in her rocker and I suddenly see how frail she is with her vertebrae clearly visible through her nightdress. "Ha ah, ah, ah." Feeling totally at a loss, I wonder if I should call an orderly or let her have her fit.

"Your, your," she's gasping and I see the tears coursing down her leathery face. "Your father would have a conniption," and then she's off again.

"So glad to provide you with what must be very scarce amusement, but it's your fault that I must transfigure into one of the few forms I can reproduce from memory," I say coldly, letting the polyjuice wash over me again. "Unless you would prefer I walk around as you."

"As me? What—My fault?" she stops laughing. "What did I ever do to you, boy?"

I recount how I came to be afflicted with her reflection, and then she laughs, more bitterly than before. "I've managed to live with staring at my face in the mirror all these years—why can't you?"

"Well, what does it mean? How can I get rid of it?" I demand.

"Child, you mistake me for someone who actually knows anything about life. I can say nothing special in any language on earth, and that's my talent. We can't all be gifted like you," and she sneers with real venom.

"My gift, as you call it, has assured that I cannot set foot in Britain, as well as causing the destruction of anyone I have ever loved," I snap. "And there was plenty you could have told me when I needed to hear it."

"Like what? None of us knew, Severus, not your grandmother, your mother nor me. Petronile thought you were possessed, but how could any of us know that this son of a Muggle was more powerful than all of us put together? As a child you weren't very promising at all-so eager to please, not enough backbone."

"So leaving me alone to care for my mother most days of the week was an exercise in building backbone? Thank you so much."

"What do you want from me? You were always looking at me with those imploring eyes, and I couldn't fathom what you thought I had to give you." Our voices are raised a little but no one seems to mind the odd hodgepodge of sounds coming from our mouths.

"This," I say, my gesture encompassing the frank talk in grim surroundings. "This is what I wanted."

She sniffs. "You're here about the boy, aren't you?" she says to get herself on surer ground.

"He's not a boy anymore," I say with a dark tone that might be regret at what he's become as a man, or might be relief.

"So much the worse for you then, eh?" she observes with a nasty grin. "You know, all the men on my mother's line, the Belacquas, all of them had kinks in their wands. Incongruents, they used to call them. Your grandmother used to wonder what your problem would be if the hereditary madness didn't get you first."

"I was a child of ten!" I am aghast.

"When I was a child of ten I had to endure hours upon hours of her experimental charms while she tried to make me 'marriageable,'" Adele comments mildly. A few images flash in my mind of what it was like to have one's face be on the receiving end of grandmother's wand. To be tormented with these imaginary suitors who never came.

She never complained about the disdain her mother handed out on a daily basis; I always thought it was some odd kind of game with them, the insults.

My morbid curiosity gets the best of me and I return to her earlier statement. "What do you mean, it runs in the family?"

"I mean all of them were sick in one way or another, the Belacqua men on down the line. Your great-uncle Valentin married his broom. Your great-great-grandfather Maurice went around in women's clothes in public. And your great-great-great uncle Horatio fell in love with his reflection and disappeared into a mirror. Count yourself lucky that didn't happen to you."

"Then what do the Belacqua women get, if they're spared perversion?"

"I should think I had quite enough to bear," she says with an odd lilt in her voice, and I think she must have congratulated herself many times over after her beautiful sister lost her mind and Adele got away relatively easy with her phenomenal ugliness.

"And Grand-mére? What was her terrible fate?" I ask. She achieved the regal bearing Adele and I never did with the Belacqua nose.

"She was—I don't like to speak of it!" she lashes at me with her tongue and her hand-magic at the same time.

We smile, nostalgic for our old lessons.

"Are you only capable of a mere tickle these days? Tsk tsk. Better stay on your toes; I could zap you halfway to China before you knew what hit you, Auntie," I say with a grin.

She snorts. "With whose magic? Not yours, surely. Is that the use you put all that magic you stole from your mother to? Transcontinental travel? I suppose that's better than her knowing what else you've done with it."

The fury ripples from me before I can control it, and the dimensions of the room shift. Some of the inmates stir and whimper in their bubbles, and a few of the card players cover their eyes. Adele looks actually frightened. This pleases me for some petty reason.

"Why did you come back if you were doing well overseas?" I ask suddenly. She may be a twisted old hag, but she seems sane enough. "Why are you in this place?"

She looks uncomfortable. "I got tired of trying to drum some sense into spoiled brats, and thought I would fix up the old house your grandmother left me. Retiring by the seaside in Dover seemed a pleasant enough notion—don't you feel some type of calm when you're near water?"

"I suppose so," I say, but my mind has started to wrestle with whether or not to ask another question.

"I can feel it even here, the ocean," Adele is saying.

I will the words out of my mouth. "Where did you bury my mother?"

"We threw her ashes into the sea," she says with a haunted look, and I realize she might have loved my mother after all.

I stand there a few more minutes, listening to Aunt Adele prattle on, obviously too proud to admit to herself that she's missed having someone with whom to share her gloating over others' misfortune and whom she can catch up on all the deaths that have happened.

"Your Aunt Petronile and her husband Liam went to go live as muggles after your trial, and were hit by a bus—"

There it is. It's a magic like a black rainbow. There are no colors anymore, there is no purple underneath. It is a spectrum made of variegated darkness. Unrushed, it whorls there with its own dark iridescence. The same black rainbow I got a hint of at the last apothecary.

This other Harry is not easy to track, not the least because he appears and disappears regularly. His signature is mutating, there is something unstable about it, as if it must keep changing in order to hold on to its separate existence. It must know about its polar opposite, mustn't it? Perhaps it is jealous of the time that person spends in control and he wants to destroy it! With that terrible thought in mind, I turn an impassive face back to my aunt.

"Cousin Veronica publicly renounced you so she could keep her ministry job, but I expect you read that in the papers," Adele drones on.

My heart pounding at what I will find at the other end of this magical trail, I look back at the hag that may very well be all that's left of my family. I should help her with the knowledge that perhaps no one else in this place could benefit from. "You might try going mad for a change. It would do you good to pay attention to what the Mantis Moths have to say."

Her lip curls in disgust and she makes a ritual movement with her hands as if brushing off insects. Many of the patients do it; anyone who has spent time in an asylum does. I still do it in my sleep, Harry says. She resumes her stone idol's posture and the rhythm her rocking had before I walked in.

My Polyjuice is running out, but I can't resist one last question. "Why do you do that?" I say, my eyes on her palsy. "I know what you're doing with the languages now, but why didn't you teach me the difference when I was a boy?"

She stops rocking, so surprised that she forgets to sneer. "Most people don't notice—I thought you were too thick to hear it, but once I thought you might hear it seemed as though you understood. Someone finally understood what it was like." Her face caves in on itself. "Switching between languages helps. I can't stand to hear myself think. Can you?" she says desperately, and I can't bear to look at now-vulnerable gargoyle-featured old woman in front of me.

"Aunt Adele, take this. You don't belong here, and I don't wish you to have to spend a lot of time convincing doctors of that fact." One of my reserve pouches of Polyjuice is hidden in the pile of yarn in her lap in a flash.

"It doesn't work for me," she sniffs. "Otherwise don't you think I'd take a new face?"

"Sadly I don't have another needle with me, but yes, unless i take it intravenously, the normal brew wears off very quickly for me as well. This, however, you should be able to get by on orally. It's the best in the world."

"That I don't doubt," Adele says, and her tone is just as sour as if she were commenting on one of the poor souls suspended in the ward, so I almost don't notice it as the first compliment she's ever paid me.

When I try to reply in kind, her face has already turned back into hewn stone. Her mannish hands have taken up the misshapen scarf she's been knitting with her hand-magic, as knitting needles are no doubt forbidden in such a place. My mind turns away from childhood hurts and longings to the stark present, and I leave Erstwhile Pickerell behind.

Now that I have categorized this black rainbow that bears no resemblance to the purple-pink that has been my home, I track this alien magic to someplace on the outskirts of London.

Where the trail disappears.

I concentrate, spreading my awareness over the whole of England, but it's no use. Neither version of Harry, the dark or the normal, is to be found.

He, like most people, can't apparate over water. Did he use a portkey? Tracking those kind of transactions could take forever, given that the only place that really keeps track of those sort of things is the Ministry, and they have no reason to share such information.

Growing concerned, I apparate to Paris and search the magical grid.

There is no Harry. The purple that has sunk deep into my marrow is silent.

Every wizard knows that our world is but one sliver of all the possible worlds. That apparating is possible by folding our one level, but that wizards who have time traveled and done other prodigious feats have done so by visiting, through conscious will or accident, one of these other worlds. If the wizarding world can be thought of as a more robust, full appreciation of the human world, it is still the same world that muggles are part of. Just because you are an adept in wizarding Britain doesn't make you any more than a flea in these other worlds, that may be very antagonistic towards you. The idea that Harry may be going back and forth from one of these places is very worrisome. No wonder the integrity of his mind is compromised. He could be going to Atlantis and his sense of good and evil is being reset.

It's also impossible for me to follow him in these places. Not without another lifetime of study. I reapparate to England and appear in Dumbledore's grate.

I'd expected to find him asleep, but he's playing what looks like a very complicated game of wizard chess with himself.

"Albus, I'm afraid I have some very bad news," I start, but he doesn't even look in my direction.

"Mmm? Oh? That's too bad," he says distractedly, moving a piece on the board. "Couldn't you advise me before you just pop in?" he hurls at me in an ugly tone when my presence suddenly sinks in.

We stare at each other. Me, because he has never once spoken to me that way, and I've done terrible things. Him, because he is busy putting a glamour over the board game while he is searching my eyes to see if I know what it is.

"Albus, I'm very sorry to stop in so late, but this is very urgent." His eyes dart over to the cloud he's made blend in with the tapestry on the wall, and his hand twitches as if to move a piece. "Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, are you playing Whither-So-Well? That's illegal!"

"I'm not at all afraid of your moral judgments, Severus," he says mildly, but there's something in his eyes that frightens me. He considers another move. "I've played it three times up until the point of your trial, and I've not been able to save you from the madhouse in any of them."

"You're going to have to save yourself from the madhouse if you keep playing it!" I'm craning half out of the grate to see this game that allows the player to create an alternate version of his or her life, and then change some of the variables to see if they would have made things turn out differently. People have played it until they dropped dead of starvation or killed themselves with despair. Some find it horrifying when they can't change their fate no matter what they do, while others can't live with knowing what the one mistake was that brought on their ruination.

The Ministry outlawed it long ago, partially because the little beings in the game actually do seem to suffer, bleed and die, and no one wanted to sit down and try to determine the ethics of such a pursuit.

"Where did you even get it?" I demand. "No one would sell such a monstrous thing to you."

"Harry gave it to me," the old man says with his eyes on the board. "We have a gentleman's agreement."

"A—what?" Sparks are flying off me, all the more reason to stay in the grate, but I'm pulling a leg out. "Does your 'gentleman's agreement' include the exchange of forbidden games with turning a blind eye to murder?"

Out of the corner of his eye Dumbledore sees me pulling myself out of the fireplace and faces me with his full attention finally. "Severus, don't! I have no wards in place!"

With horror I realize I've just appeared, full in the flesh, in Dumbledore's space without asking. Diving back into the in-between presence afforded by the grate, I duck my head, abashed. "I'm so sorry, Albus, of course you are not well and shouldn't risk losing any of your magic to me. This matter is of grave importance, or I wouldn't have disturbed you at this hour and without notice."

Suddenly I am reminded of watching the same man, 25 years ago, at dinner in the Great Hall, watching the girls leave the table sobbing because they had no partner for the dance. Then, as now, the pieces were almost visibly fitting together behind Dumbledore's face. "How long?" he asks, his face looking terribly tired.

"Ever since he returned to England, it seems. I should have been checking on him, but it seemed best to give him his privacy." The old man's face is a knot. "And honestly, I didn't want to think about our past for a change. I was with someone else."

He accepts the admission of my own fault with a movement before returning to his own. "We've been closer than ever before. Writing letters, I had him and his friends for supper on numerous occasions. I sensed not one thing out of place. I was—relieved, proud."

"That's just it, Dumbledore, there wasn't anything out of place." And I give him my theory about the separate magical personalities along with my observations from the dream realm and following his magical signature. "There is no way you could have known."

"But you figured it out," he says with a raw edge to his voice.

"Only because I sell the sort of potions people take for their vices, and to conceal the same." He nods, acknowledging this unique monitor this gives me on the wizarding world. "And even then, he tricked my bird friends into not telling me he'd been stealing from my cottage!"

"So all of his mental and magical faculties are intact in this other state?"

"It appears so, but even more worrisome is that he seems to leave this plane altogether. What do you know about traveling in the other realms?"

And we have a heated conversation about the dangers besetting us from all sides and the various possibilities for averting them. Just like old times.

By the time the sun is rising, Albus looks exhausted so I insist that he take some Dreamless Sleep I fetch from my store at the cottage. By the time I float it to him from the grate he's nearly asleep, but I wake him up so he can down the phial and sleep properly in the bed, which looks like it is much less used than the sofa next to the table with the game on it.

When he's safely asleep I cast a net such as Hermes Trismgestus himself couldn't get out of, and keep the sleeping old man where he is while I smash the game into a fine powder, sure that my already besmirched conscience can take whatever Harrowing Fire is released by killing these alternate-reality little humans. I've long since figured out the proper proportions for neutralizing Reaper's Reward with Cimarron Salt.

It's rather satisfying to know that there's a tiny Severus Snape that was just pulverized.

Sleeping for only two hours in my muggle hotel bed rejuvenates my body perfectly, but my spirit is heavy when I wake up at midday. Then my body goes rigid—Harry's back! He's his normal self a few blocks away!

Hastily throwing on some clothes and rigging myself up with the Polyjuice intake system, I leave the room and track him to a restaurant nearby. It suddenly strikes me that I'm starving, so I go in before I can consider whether it's a good idea or not.

As I sensed, he's with some of his colleagues. The girl who has some sense of Spagyrics is there, but she doesn't seem to notice anything amiss as I sit at the far end of the establishment and ask for the first thing on the menu with the Welsh accent that I suddenly hope is very good. While I fidget with my water glass and then with the magazine I conjure out of my jacket pocket, I try to Categorize him in a clinical fashion so I don't have to be stung by how closed he is to me.

Stop being such a snivelling snot! You broke up with him, didn't you? Would you rather he know who you are? All of his friends would be smiting you from all sides while you blubbered some apology! I chastise myself and then tear into the bread with a vengeance.

He really does seem fine. If I didn't know to find that suspect, I'd give him a clean bill of magical health. He's laughing with his friends, who clearly defer to him. They're obviously a close-knit group. The kind of support he needs to walk his rather lonely destiny.

His face is clearer than I've seen it since he was 15. Clearer. He knows who he is and what he wants, and he's achieving it.

It's going to kill him to find out what he's done.

I force myself to chew the muggle pasta that would probably seem tasteless to me after Shanti's cooking, but it turns into a black paste that almost chokes me.

He leaves with his group and I let the purple firefly of his magic hover within my system for a little while longer. It will not be the same once it is forced to reunite with the dark rainbow that has been killing people. And I am going to have the thankless job of making the introductions.

Dumbledore is looking fidgety when I pop back in later that evening with nothing to report but Harry's afternoon at his studio.

"Thank you for destroying it," he says in that peculiar, vague tone of voice that makes my skin crawl. "I wasn't winning that time either."

"Albus, this is for real! Play this game now, and maybe we can save a life or ten!" I shout at him, and then catch myself. "I'm sorry, Harry's just so bloody content. I feel like the criminal for having to shatter his well-being."

The old wizard nods tiredly and dips a chocolate frog in some warm milk brought by a house elf, who scowls at me before leaving the room. "You never did like house elves, did you, Severus?"

"I think it's that they don't like me. We never had them growing up because my father despised them," I say. "He always felt like they were mocking him and would spit in his soup when his back was turned. And then they wouldn't listen to him because he was a muggle."

"I'm fully aware that Sissy mocks me all the time," he says with milk in his beard. "The trick is to act as silly as possible and then they don't know where to start." Now his beard is in his milk. "Yes, there's really no way to spare his feelings. Have you given any more thought on how to proceed?"

"You know what I think," I shoot back. "I take responsibility for the crimes, which is not an exaggeration at all, and you keep him on the regime of potions I've laid out for the rest of his life. He may be a little sluggish but I'd like to see someone do any Otherworld travel with a system full of Lunkwood Liquor. Add in a binding spell designed by two of the most powerful wizards in this hemisphere, and he should be able to keep himself to himself without any danger."

Dumbledore floats a cup of tea, which turns rather molten in the grate but feels good going down. "This is absolutely ludicrous and you know it," he says. "We have no way of knowing what we can or cannot do to control what this other part of him does. And you sacrificing yourself for him will accomplish absolutely nothing."

On the contrary, it might do wonders for my conscience.

"Nothing! Tell that to the families of the victims! How can you just move a bead or two on your great abacus of Wizarding Britain and say that justice has or hasn't been served?"

"So you'll only be satisfied with someone in jail," he states.

"No, I, yes, I don't know!" My teacup smashes in the fireplace. "All I know is, everything in my life has been ruled by an exacting and painful measure of justice. He's going to find out eventually. And when he does, let me tell you, the Reaper's Reward will be the least of his concerns. He'll go mad, Albus, no one can stand being hit by all that darkness and guilt all at once."

The idea of my Harry floating in a mute scream while wearing a smock in Erstwhile Pickerell makes me sob, and I cry fiery tears for a long time. If as a small boy I could keep my mother from such a fate, I must as a man keep the only person I have loved as much from the asylum.

Dumbledore gets up slowly from his sofa and walks like the ancient man he is over to the furnace to stroke my hair a couple times.

"Tristan?" I ask before I realize I'm not wearing my Julian-form. Not knowing what to do I've been revisiting all of Harry's haunts. I felt traces of his magic around the meeting place where Harry's group congregates, but as far as I could tell, he was traveling elsewhere in England. Now that he's right in front of me, I'd give anything for our old accord in which Harry spent more time with this healthy-looking young wizard than with me, who listened to Harry relating their adventures after the fact.

The young Frenchman turns around, confused. "Yes, do I know you?" he asks in English.

"I met you in Gregor's bar in Paris," I say in French. "Do you not remember? I am Antoine's nephew. You were rather drunk that night, well, we all were."

"Of course," he says in French with a practiced air. Obviously he's drunk himself to distraction enough times that this is not an impossible occurrence. "How is old Gregor?" And he does an impression of the suspicious squib's habit of peering over his shoulder for the stray spell from his clientele.

We laugh. "Is there any good place to drink around here?" I ask. "I've been sort of keeping a low profile. I hear things are not quite so liberal in wizarding England as in France."

He accepts my allusion to different attitudes towards homosexuality in the two countries without comment. "There are a lot of differences. You can swill as much alcohol as you like in muggle or wizarding bars, but you won't find absinthe or any of the more entertaining magical brews here, either," he says. "How long are you in town for?" And we exchange banalities and some absurd story I've made up about being estranged from my family, as he leads me to a bar much like Gregor's, which is also run by a squib.

My store of Polyjuice is running out, so I excuse myself to the bathroom so I can apparate back to my room and attach a new container before returning to the table. "To new beginnings," he toasts and we drink a couple rounds while I try to sort out what I'm doing here with Harry's closest friend. It's not hard to get him talking about the studio and to say I'd met Harry once, but Tristan seems to be a loyal friend who is all too aware that Harry has many things he'd like to keep private.

Luckily, the alcohol has no effect on me, so when Tristan's discretion has dissolved in a number of pints I manage to wrest a little something out of him. "That's awfully brave of Harry to be working so closely with the Hogwarts staff to develop the new curriculum. I hear he had some bad experiences there."

"Harry talks to me sometimes about it," Tristan says with slightly glassy eyes. "He's the best person I've ever met. I honestly wish I could fall in love with him, because I'd like to make him feel about himself the way I see him. At least he knows it isn't because I grew up hearing about The Boy Who Lived—though I think he would have been much happier growing up in France!"

We clink glasses again and toast to France, then to French women—and men, he adds—and by the time we get to specific French dishes I've begun to work it out.

Rather nervously I get closer to a magical person than I have in a long time. Using my hand magic I steer Tristan by the shoulders. "You're drunk," I say, and he looks confused to see that I'm not. "Let me help you get home—you're in no state to apparate," and he nods when the hex I put on his legs make them even less able to hold him up.

After leaving a fistful of money on table I lead him out of the bar, nodding to the barkeeper, who doesn't realize I am saving him the cost of a bar's worth of broken glasses and bottles. When we're outside I whisper in my own voice. "Harry, I know you're in there."

Tristan falls towards me, his limbs flopping without coordination. I grasp his short hair and apparate us into a deserted area.

"I bet you loved getting close to him like that," Harry's voice comes out of his friend's mouth.

"Actually I've never found him to be remotely attractive," I say, trying to keep Harry's attention away from my hand. "You're the one that's in love with him, obviously."

Tristan's blonde head flops back and forth. Thank Hermes he's drunk, or realizing he's been possessed at least occasionally would be a very unpleasant idea.

"No, you bastard, you made sure I couldn't fall in love with anyone but you," Harry's voice shouts. "I just like being him sometimes. Is that so wrong, to want to be normal and see that Harry Potter can be normal?"

"Come out of this boy's body and we'll talk. You can do anything you like to me Harry. I deserve it. But this isn't healthy for your friend, and once he finds out what you've been doing he will be upset."

Harry's expression takes on that childlike worry that he's hurt someone he cares about—the polar opposite of the other Harry who has been attacking men in filthy warehouses. "All right. But stand back. I don't want you to make me sick."

Humbly, I back up several yards and wait, curious to see how he has been going in and out of this other body. Strands of purple start unfurling from Tristan's chest and eventually assemble into a Harry. "I didn't even do it on purpose the first time, but I've been doing it on and off since Paris," he says, vaguely ashamed. "We're like brothers and he has such a calming effect on me that, well, I felt an opening and I took it."

"He doesn't know?" I ask with the phial in my hand.

"No, of course not. And you know, he might not even mind if he did. He's that kind of friend. That's why Dumbledore was always trying to encourage me to date him—he's good for me." Harry is busy glaring at me with all of the hurt he has been storing up from our breakup.

Perfect.

The liquid has become a mist that is clinging around him before he realizes what has happened.

"This was all a trick! One of your obscene little potions experiments? I should have known you couldn't just listen!" Harry yells, finding himself stuck in a magical net. "Did you come back to spy on me and then get jealous when you saw me doing so well? Fuck you, Severus. You were what was wrong in my life. I'm strong and healthy and productive now that you're not clinging to me with your simpering melancholy and submissive, needy little ass."

He's working himself up to a frenzy. It won't take much.

"And what are you doing without my ass?" I ask simply.

The stream of obscenities almost knocks me flat. Eventually I can make out some of what he's screaming.

"You disgusting cunt. You miserable, filthy slut. You never got it as good as I gave it to you, nasty slag. You almost drained me dry and then begged for more. You want me so bad you would let yourself kill me and even then you'd keep fucking me. You're a freak and a monster and I can't believe I didn't see you coming a mile away when I was seventeen and you filled my head with poison—" He is so angry the words are sticking in his throat.

I wait.

There's no reason to remind him that we were both used by Voldemort. That we both should have our names on a plaque somewhere and live in luxury as disabled veterans who gave everything—and are still giving—for the sake of a society without Voldemort.

If only all of these old hurts were the only ones he would have to bear.

"And I'll never have a normal relationship thanks to you, and that's the way you like it so you can worm your way back into my life." The words are coming more slowly now but I can see the vaporized decoction of a Drowsing Worm's tail is being tested by the shift that is trying to take place.

"I should fucking kill you. That's what you want, isn't it? I should have let you throw yourself into the ocean like the pitiful drama queen you are. But it's not too late. I'm going to put you out of your misery and make the world a safer place." The misty cage is shuddering with the power of his anger. "You left me with my wand you fool," he cries suddenly, and hurls the first syllable at me. "Cruc—"

The mirror is in front of his eyes at the same moment.

He sees his face.

The features corresponding with the black pearl of his dark magic must be completely unfamiliar to the other Harry, so when they encounter each other it is matter meeting anti-matter.

Watching all of his plans become overtaken by wave after wave of blackness is positively the worst thing I've ever seen.

And I've seen a few.

His face registers the luring, the fucking, the torture and death. His curriculum—and I've seen Albus' copy of it—it's the most brilliant advance in wizarding pedagogy I've ever seen—his curriculum becomes the wet dream of a serial killer, a pastime in between assaults.

Right before my eyes.

Using my hands as a makeshift pelican, I boil and then mist another potion I've been carrying around, a calming mixture, because I know he won't allow himself any respite, but I personally can't stand to hear his screams.

"I didn't want to be the cause of your chronic illness or death." I say when he has screamed his throat raw. "I didn't want to hurt you and I didn't want to live with having done so in the name of love. I should have accepted it if that's what you wanted. What is a conscience, more or less, when I've already damned myself to hell many times over?" He's collapsed in the corner of his magical cage like an animal that has given up on escaping from the zoo, but his eyes stay on mine, wanting to drink the horror to its dregs. "At least we had each other."

The awareness that we can't very well untangle our fates now settles over us like a not-unwelcome blanket.

"What about your woman?" Harry says as if it's an insulting term.

"That was never meant to be," I say, and tell him what we're going to do.

We give ourselves one day to say goodbye.

The dish slips from Shanti's hand and crashes on the ground.

"You can't just come in and out like you're still part of my life," she says from the ground, where she's scooping up broken crockery and rice.

"I know. That's why I've come to say goodbye."

"Oh, well, I sort of filled in the blanks when you left me in mid-sentence some weeks ago, but thank you for showing me once again how little you think of my intelligence."

I let her rail at me for a few minutes, wishing she would say even worse, because I deserve a much harsher punishment than some additional moments in the presence of this miraculous woman who was mine for so short a time.

Or rather, she was Julian's.

"Please leave," she says, sinking into a chair tiredly. "I never want to see you again."

"You won't, I promise you that. But there's something you need to see before I leave you."

"When will you understand—I'm not impressed by your little tricks! Pull a rabbit out of midair, I don't—"

She screams.

And screams.

She screams so long and so loud I have to cast a muting spell on her, something I never wanted to do.

It takes about five minutes for her to adjust to what she sees before her.

She doesn't even know he's one of the most wanted wizards in Europe, and she's already horrified by Severus Snape.

When she seems calmer I lift the spell.

"What is this thing you have done to yourself?" Her body is trembling but her voice is recovered.

The Thing draws a few newspaper clippings out of its pocket. "Please, you should know this."

She sits and I hand her the clippings one by one.

Hogwarts Professor Deposed for Suspected Immorality with Student

Shanti compares the face in the moving photograph to the Thing's.

Snape Victim is Found to be the Boy Who Lived

She gasps a little when she recognizes the young Harry.

Snape Found to Be Monstrous Magic-stealing Life Form Called Alkahest!

Shanti takes a long time reading this one and puts it aside still frowning in confusion.

Alkahest on Trial—Ministry Confident of Conviction on Morals Charge

Her mouth drops open looking at the restrained Thing with the mad, vacant eyes, but then she closes it again.

Alkahest Case Closed for Lack of Evidence; Fiend Will be Locked in Undisclosed Asylum

Alkahest Released! Ministry Advises Public Not to Panic—Threat is Going Abroad

Shanti looks at the picture of me taken as I emerged onto Diagon Alley on my first day as a free man. In many ways I've not stopped being this ghastly-pale, long-haired, spindly man with a fragile grasp on his sanity. I look like him to Shanti, except my waist is at this moment still narrow from the corset I stopped wearing when Harry left my life. To her, I must look like a cricket with an impractical carapace. Some part of me is greedily eating up the revulsion my ex-lover feels for the true me. "I was right to never tell her," I'm thinking as she is reading the last clipping.

Alkahest Murder Spree Continues—Two More Wizards Found Dismembered

"No, Jul-, Severus," her mouth contorts around the name. "You did not do these things."

"No I did not," I say, surprised that she didn't think the worst of this face that has never inspired the remotest bit of confidence in anyone.

"Well, then?" She gets up to make tea.

Par le trismegiste! This muggle woman doesn't know you don't just make tea for the Alkahest!

"Do you really like lemon in your tea or was that a lie too?" she asks.

"I do, in fact, like lemon." She drops a slice in my cup. "I can't change what I like just like that, Shanti. And being able to change my form like this, it is not something anyone can do, which is why I was able to start a new life without questions. You see what I was leaving behind."

"You molested a student," she says into her teacup.

"I laid not one finger on Harry until he was eighteen and no longer a student."

"How old are you really?"

"Forty-five."

"Really?" She scrutinizes my face. "You look at least ten years younger."

The thought of how many life-forces are responsible for that rejuvenative effect makes me bury my face in my arms.

The feeling of fingertips on my unlovable Severus Snape arm make me shudder. "Don't."

"No, you don't. It's Harry, isn't it. You're going to cover for Harry."

My Severus-self leaps in his lover's defense. "What could possibly make you say such a thing about Harry? He's the finest wizard, the finest man I've ever known."

"I only met him once, but the way he looked at me, Julian, I've never felt like someone would actually kill me before that moment. Like he would do anything to keep me from getting in between you." Her eyes do that awful Garuda thing that makes them grow large and dark with my reflected horror. "I never told you because I knew it would hurt you too much. But I did check with the school to see that he had withdrawn from classes, and spoke with Belda about my concern that he might come back."

"You did this, you interfered with Harry's well-being behind my back? It's just our culture that makes people protective of their mates."

"This was my well-being I was worried about, and yes, I did." Her eyes have regained their old defiance. "Belda, who is of your culture, she told me that she was worried about Harry as well. She'd had a dream about him."

I almost spill my tea. "What was it?" When a chiromancer dreams about you, it's almost always significant.

"Well, she couldn't tell me all of it, because she claimed some double effect rule meant she could only tell me the parts having to do with just me."

The professional ethics of dream interpretation have never been so frustrating. "She dreamt about you and Harry?"

"And you. She said that now that I'd stepped where most would fear to tread, I should see it through to the that what you really needed was someone who could get you to reveal all of yourself, but who that would be was anyone's guess."

My hands move imperceptibly apart. They had been gearing up to Obliviate her so that she didn't devote one ounce more of her energy to this Thing. But Belda is right. Shanti deserves the chance to learn whatever she needed to learn from her affair with Julian. Hopefully it won't take very long for her to leave this episode of her life behind.

"You know how cagey Belda is, so I couldn't tell whether she thought you were a threat as well, and I couldn't bear that. So I told her about the man I had come to know, how intently you try to better your knowledge of healing, how you didn't seem to think you deserved even a moment's rest. I think I made her see that you could not possibly be the cause of all of Harry's pain."

"Foolish woman, you don't know of what you speak," my old Severus voice barks out. "I'm sorry. I would just prefer to be the judge of that."

We sit and regard each other for a few long moments: the ever-radiant muggle with the warm brown skin and the chaotic hair. And the mutant, the wanted man, Severus Snape.

"We're turning ourselves in tonight. But before that, I couldn't leave you with this lie for any longer."

"Stay with me." My jaw drops and mentally I adjust my internal Rosetta ring because the words don't make any sense. "Stay with me, whoever you are."

"You must be mad. After everything you read? I've committed crimes they didn't even try me for. You don't want to bed down with a murderer and a sexual deviant. Be a credit to your kind—even muggles aren't that foolish."

"I've always tried to make decisions for myself—though not for my 'kind.' Perhaps you are everything you say. But I'd like to kick you out of my life of my own accord, thank you." Her hard face has the thinnest ghost of her devilish smile. "Actually, I'm looking forward to it."

"You would be with this?" My gesture encompasses the nose, the odd torso, the effeminate braids. "That's quite a step down from Julian."

"This is the man you would become when you floated out of the room. I'd rather be with this than the shadow of a man I'm constantly trying to pin down." She grins flirtatiously. "Besides, you look—interesting."

"No, Shanti-ma. Whatever they do to Harry, I will be by his side. I was wrong to leave him when I saw I was doing him harm." Her expression reflects her confusion. "Being an Alkahest, it means that I hurt magical people, as if they are allergic to me. Harry has come close to death several times from being near me."

Something clicks in her face. "That is why." And she's giving me That Look so intensely it makes me want to scream.

So I scream a little. At this late date, why stand on formality?

"As I told you, I couldn't understand most of what you said in your sleep, but one thing I did hear in French and English, over and over again, was 'Please, I'm sorry, Please, I'm sorry.'"

"Please, I'm sorry," I say as she takes me in her arms. It takes all of my will to apparate out from the center of her warm embrace.

My next stop is to the lab to check in on Andre and Mick.

The scientist is talking to the mold while he sets up some calibration technique I don't understand. I watch them for awhile—the Animate Mold, that most inscrutable of creatures, and the careful Senegalese, they are both in the flush of health. Andre's career is going to be bright. I turn my back on what may be the one good thing I've done in my life, and move to one last thing that will be left unfinished.

Rukmini. She lies in the bed, just as I left her. Taking a liberty I've not done before, I touch her skin to apply one last dose of skin salve. Her skin is perfect, and I hope it will stay that way with the supply of unguents I left for Shanti to find in her apartment, along with a set of prescriptions for her to track down in a magical apothecary's once my trademarked compounds are gone.

Rukmini. The twin streams of her life flow away from each other, body and mind, and I wish I could find a Mercurial Ouroboros to meld them together again.

She is the eel that swims an immense distance across the sea of her mind and bumps against my shin to comfort me. She knows. We exist together in this place beyond words, beyond lies, beyond my paltry attempts to fix her.

She gives me a piece of her infinity where I can find her always, a private sea I can carry with me in this future where I will be divested of everything else.

This stranger is harder for me to abandon than Dumbledore or Shanti, who I know and love so differently but so deeply.

At last the time approaches for Harry and me to meet.

"Come back to Shanti; she needs you more than ever." And I leave Rukmini as I do every time: "Remember that there are people waiting for you on this side of the beyond."

(End Book 2)


	59. Chapter 59

The Pelican's Bequest Book 3 / Chapter 59: The Jailer's Dilemma

_A nest is found in the forest,_

_In which Hermes has his brood;_

_One fledgling always strives to fly upward,_

_The other rejoices to sit quietly in the nest;_

_Yet neither can get away from the other._

_The one that is below holds the one that is above,_

_And will not let it get away from the nest,_

_As a husband in a house with his wife,_

_Bound together in closest bonds of wedlock._

_-The Book of Lambspring_

I've come to turn myself in for the murders of ten people," Harry says without inflection.

The Ministry official glances at me for a moment but my father's face means nothing to him. He turns back to Harry.

"Listen, Harry, we all know you've had some troubles—anyone would have—but you're not talking sense." The man pulls at his collar before saying, "Don't you have someone that you—talk to—when you feel upset? Maybe the Ministry can find you someone."

"None of the news reports give all the information." Harry begins recounting. "Their hands. Their wands, they—" He pauses for a long moment and then whispers nearly inaudibly, his face turning green.

He vomits.

"Can't you just find the person in charge of things like this and make this a little easier on him?" I snap at the official who seems to be paralyzed before the puddle of vomit. I couldn't really hear what Harry said, but apparently the detail he uttered was enough to convince the man of something.

The man darts through a doorway. In a few moments a woman appears in the hallway. She takes in Harry leaning on me for support. "And you are?" she asks.

"Julian Moreau," I say. "A friend."

Harry holds on so tightly to me that they have no choice but to let me stay during the entire interrogation. He doesn't cry. Somehow he makes it to the end of the statement without collapsing.

"I hate to do this, Harry, Mr. Potter, but you know you're going to have to go to Azhkaban while awaiting trial," she says. "Maybe there are mitigating circumstances, but until we can determine what those are—"

"If you take Harry to Azhkaban, I'm afraid that I shall have to turn myself in as an accomplice," I say, shifting back into my true form.

The ministry employees jump a yard back each. "It's the Alkahest!" one of them shouts and soon the cry is taken up around the ministry. I can feel the magic draining away as the bulk of the employees flows out of the building.

Admirably, the woman has stayed in the room, but her wand is pointing straight at me, not at the person who just confessed to ten murders. "Did you put him up to this confession to conceal your own crimes, Snape?" she spits.

"I wish that were the case," I say with great sadness, and something in my tone disarms her a little.

"Then how are you an accomplice?" she asks.

Harry and I launch into the story we prepared with Dumbledore's help, citing the potions I supposedly supplied him with and some alleged magic that would allow him to shift magical signatures and not get caught, all of which I gave him with the full knowledge of what he would do with them. That I ruined his life once already hardly needs to be said.

If it turns out that I need to admit to more at the trial, then I will. For now, we're going to play the cards as Albus suggested.

"So I suppose you'll have to take me into custody as well," I offer.

"Azhkaban is not set up for the likes of you," she says with disgust. "You'll muck up all the magics keeping degenerates like you off the street. They tried it the last time you were arrested and half a wing almost escaped."

"I vaguely remember the Dementors finding me somewhat indigestible, but I was rather distracted at the time."

Actually, I consumed it, but I need hardly remind her because the calculations are whirring behind her eyes, just as we'd hoped.

"The last time I was in this situation, I had a trust fund covering my very expensive specialized hospital care, but now the trust has been used up and sadly, I am no longer mad and thus not fodder for the asylum."

If she's aware of being led in a certain direction she doesn't seem to mind. Instinctively she's edging towards the door, away from the being who is indeed sampling buckets of her magic just to show that he really can.

"What are you proposing?" she asks bluntly, for what must surely be the first time in the history of interrogations.

"That I will withdraw my statement of guilt, thus relieving the ministry of the burden of my incarceration, if you agree to banish us both."

"Banish?" she asks. "Where? We're just supposed to let you live out your lives as a murderer and a—whatever you are-in some remote corner of the globe? That's just not done."

"On the contrary, my good lady, it has been done, and was quite common up until last century," I say smoothly, amazed that Dumbledore's plan seems to be working. "We don't mind waiting here while you consult with some of the wizard penal historians and other authorities. Ward the door if you like. If we came to turn ourselves in, we're hardly an escape risk."

Actually I could scoop Harry up in my arms and batter or apparate my way out, but he'd never forgive me for prolonging his ordeal.

She dashes out the door with visible relief and Harry and I stare at each other.

"Dumbledore is a crafty old bastard," Harry finally says, and we laugh mirthlessly.

"How do we know they won't send us to some place in Antarctica?" he asks for the hundredth time since we started discussing the plan.

"Albus would probably do nothing short of committing hara-kiri, much the way Nurse Lessmore did for me." That is one death, above all the others, that I don't want to have on my head. "He has too many people in his court for anyone to let that happen."

Harry's eyes get an empty look in them that conveys just how many people he expects to have in his court by the time his case comes to trial.

The woman comes back, looking much the worse for wear, and stands in the doorway stanching a nosebleed next to two thuggish-looking men who couldn't be anything other than jailers and the Minister himself.

I allow myself to take an orgasm's worth of magic from each of the three men and they shrink back even farther.

"Have you had time to discuss our situation?" I ask, willing each of their magics towards me like a snake charmer. They rush out, and then the Minister's voice booms into the room with the help of a charm. "These are serious charges. We can't just let you go on your own recognizance while the crimes are being sorted and we proceed to trial."

"Need I point out that the only reason you were able to keep me locked up before my previous trial was because I was stark, raving mad," I say amiably. "As it stands, I can absorb the magic of any one of you who tries to apprehend us—and do much worse to him in return. No chain or lock or strongroom can hold me." The dimensions of the room shift and I hear an exclamation as a window appears in the wall revealing four frightened faces. "I am here on my will alone, and will consent to nothing unless certain terms about Harry's welfare are met."

I glance at my former lover and he is looking at me with a kind of awe I don't at all deserve. Would that I had defended him with all of my might earlier, and we wouldn't be begging for exile.

"Then what do you propose?" the minister asks for the second time in the history of interrogations.

"That you house us in an abandoned ministry property for the time being and, if you convict Harry, you settle each of us on a neighboring island somewhere in a temperate climate."

"And if we find only one of you guilty?" the minister asks with relish, obviously holding a preference for which one.

"Then execute me if I don't cheat the hangman first," I state quietly.

"No!" Harry speaks up for the first time during this exchange. "No you bastard, you fucking freak," he's punching me over and over in the stomach. Now he's crying. Angry tears coursing down his man's face. "How dare you think you can leave me? If you go, I go. If I have to be alive, you do too, or I kill us both—you cheater, you liar, it's not fair—"

I sit there and watch the ministry officials try to fathom our relationship and give up.

"Evidently there are some complicated considerations in the event of any sentence," the minister says drily. I drain about six months' worth of magic out of his spine just for that. He's going to be relying on one of his lackeys to let him into the ministry toilets for a long while at this rate.

"It will take us some time to determine which of Britain's outposts will do—" he begins.

"The abandoned armory on the ministry's island property off Cornwall will do nicely," I say and smile as nicely as I can. This holding has been out of use for many years because activity on the small island was deemed too likely to attract muggle attention.

"Then give us some time to put this request through to Cornwall and see if this island is suitable," the minister says a little more forcefully than I think necessary. His magic is actually rather interesting. A red with some sort of sparkle to it. I absorb as much as I think I will need for extensive study and then some. The fact that he stalks away upright is quite impressive.

Harry looks at me as he hasn't since he was a student. "That was amazing, Severus," he says and kisses me.

The window disappears.

We sit on the floor and he leans back into my arms. We sit like that for a long time, me stroking his head occasionally, him playing with one of my pigtails. The thought comes to me that this is true love—when everything has gone further to shit than you thought possible, and you can sit quietly together waiting to face the next loss.

"Sev, don't take this the wrong way, but if I had to be in this fucked up situation, I'm glad I'm in it with you."

"Same here."

I wrap my body entirely around him and we sleep.

Several different magics wake me when they're far down the corridor, but I merely sit there at the ready without betraying I'm awake. The door is thrown open and the light blinds me for a second, but the people attached to the three sets of legs make disgusted sounds when they see my posture with Harry.

"Only the Alkahest would be in the mood at a time like this," says a female voice that sounds vaguely familiar.

Harry and I extricate ourselves and wait, as two halves of the same destroyed being, for whatever new unpleasantness is in store.

"On your feet," says one man who seems to be wearing a ridiculous cloak made of spun lead, as if that would keep me at bay.

I get up and help Harry to a standing position, from which we make eye contact with the two men, this time clearly the roughest Azhkaban-tempered jailers they could find, and a woman about my age who seems to be glamouring her nose rather clumsily.

Cousin Veronica!

"Dear cousin, I had the chance to speak to our Aunt Adele recently and she passed along the news of your ministry appointment," I say in the most unctuous tone I can manage under the circumstances. As expected, the two men give her incredulous looks and shift slightly away from her. "Apparently I was—indisposed-when you first took office and then the news took a long time getting to me."

"He was off his head, actually," Harry chimes in. "Didn't even get the Prophet where they kept him."

"If only they had kept him, mudblood scum," Veronica says, trying to ignore me completely. "Mr. Potter, we could probably arrange much more hospitable quarters for what may be a very long trial, but we can't let the Alkahest near—"

"Not 'the Alkahest'-Severus Jacques Theophrastus Belacqua Laurent Snape," Harry says as if listing his six favorite flavors of ice cream. "Aren't you a Belacqua, Cousin Veronica? You don't mind if I call you 'cousin,' do you, since Sev and I are practically married and that makes you the next best thing to family? Speaking of family, I'm a mudblood myself, so maybe that's why Sev and I are so compatible."

The smoldering look Harry gives me is enough to distract me from my own possible execution.

I melt.

The two grizzled guards look like they wish they had a bowl of crisps to pass around while they watch a spectacle better than what's on the telly. Through this interchange I expect Harry and I will live forever in long boring nights at Azkaban.

Cousin Veronica appears to be thinking the same thing, because she pulls herself up very straight and does her best impression of Aunt Adele, whom I suppose we've both modeled a lifetime's worth of haughtiness after—my haughtiness is infinitely better than hers, I might add.

"I am here on behalf of the ministry to release you to these—custodians—who will conduct you to your new home," she smirks. "If anything happens to them on the way there, or if one or both of you leaves the island without proper escort and permission, any agreements about your joint custody and/or sentencing are off. It seems there may have been a clause in the charges that were dismissed against you years ago," here she smiles and the curve of her lip is exactly the same as Adele's when she used to watch us smite each other as children. "You may be tried again for those infractions along with your new crimes."

"Dear Veronica," I say. "There have been so few pleasures in my life." My hand rubs Harry's back and he puts his arm around me. "But come gallows, guillotine or Cruciatus, this is one pleasure I will always remember," I say, and cast a colored glow over the magic so that she can see what I am transferring from her body to mine as fast as a waterfall.

Her shriek when her legs gave out running down the corridor was a thousand times better than the one she used to let out when I put Gelatinous Bile in her pigtails after she called me a Mudblood.

I shoot a grateful look to Harry, who winks at me while the two ruffians are explaining how we will be locked to them while traveling by portkey.

"Let's make this quick, no funny business, all right?" says the larger of the two.

"We're going to need to, er, search you first," the smaller man says. "Don't make it harder on yourselves than you have to. We have our methods."

Harry and I exchange a miserable look and start taking off our clothes.

"Don't bother," one of them says and intones a charm that all but turns us inside out.

To distract Harry I say, "I think I made up for all of Cousin Veronica's teasing and then some tonight."

"I've been wanting to tell her a thing or two since she published her renunciation of you in the paper. I assumed you knew," he says a little shakily.

"I get so much press it's hard to keep up," I answer drily.

"Family," the shorter of the two men says, and then we're suddenly on top of the roof and then spinning to Cornwall.

"'Fraid we only have a few packets of tea and biscuits," the larger man, Freddy, says when he's walked us into the half-collapsed armory that still has one watertight wing. They're using their wands to light the way and don't say anything about the light I produce with my hands. They've been keeping a wide berth, but have actually been extraordinarily decent, considering. "They'll drop by more supplies in the morning."

"Oh, here's the kettle," the other man, Jim, says, resizing the shrunken teakettle with his wand. "There's a stream right over there with water."

"Thank you for everything," Harry says. It's jarring, seeing someone so respectful and likable beginning a lifetime of punishment.

The two men exchange a look and then Freddy says, "Um, Mr. Potter, we just wanted to say that, er—"

"We're sorry it's come to this for you. We really are," Jim chimes in. "We hope they go easy on you. It's not right," and without specifying what "it" he means, the two men disappear.

Harry puts his arm around me and we inspect our new quarters, which will take some work to make habitable but at least will keep us dry. He tries to build a fire with his muggle lighter which they left him with after confiscating our wands but I light it when he grows frustrated. I float the teakettle to where I can sense the water in the dark. While we wait for the water to boil we sit in companionable silence.

"You were amazing back there with my cousin," I kiss him on the cheek. "Really, that meant everything to me, you sticking up for me like that in front of my family."

The kettle begins to rattle and I levitate it off the fire and pour us tea. With his wand confiscated, Harry is going to feel the difference between our magical powers acutely—and it will only get worse as his magic is affected by my constant presence. He's scowling, which makes me think he's realizing the same thing. "You've never said that we were 'basically married' before, even as a joke," I say in a playful tone to distract him.

"You and Dumbledore managed to convince me that exile with you is more attractive than Azkaban… just," Harry says bitterly. "We're worse than married because we can't live without each other. Don't you think I'd give anything if I could? I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on earth," he says matter-of-factly and then he kisses me breathless.


	60. Chapter 60

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 60: Gold

_But you must, nevertheless, allow this, and confess that it is a miracle produced by the Spagyrist, who by the art of his preparation corrupts a visible body which is externally vile, from which he excites another most noble and most precious essence._

_The Book Concerning The Tincture Of The Philosophers_

_by Paracelsus_

After absorbing all of that magic from the ministry employees I won't need to sleep for a month at least. Which suddenly seems like a punishment. Time is already taking a shape and a texture as one of our primary enemies.

We have two weeks in Cornwall to begin to adjust to our new status. The Ministry owns many islands around the world, but it's a question of warding them properly so that Harry—and especially I—cannot escape.

While the authorities are working out the details, there is nothing to do. Or at least, nothing for Harry to do.

I can gossip with the birds and send them to Dumbledore to exchange news between my messengers and Fawkes. Using my hand-magic I can levitate some of the fallen stones according to Harry's direction. He's right; I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to construction. I can make meals and explore the flora and fauna.

Albus has kindly sent us some shrunken packets of tobacco with the help of a bird, so Harry smokes. He seems to have held on to the pipe given to him by To'an the Vietnamese shaman, and I curse the gift from the mage and his affinity for smoke.

It takes a long time to convince Harry that sending for Hedwig will mean her certain death. The ministry will not want his familiar to know how to find him, because that would mean our ultimate destination would be known to someone other than our jailers. We will only be allowed mail as part of the sanctioned shipments, which, judging from the sparse rations in Cornwall, won't be very often.

For me, resignation is almost a relief.

It only takes us a few days to start looking at each other as jailers.

"What are you staring at?" Harry bursts out one evening over our thin soup and roast potatoes.

"Your hair looks different."

"It's the same."

"Perhaps you got a suntan. Yes, that's it."

"I'm exactly the same," comes the response through gritted teeth.

"Suit yourself." Soon the kettle is on for our evening tea, this time supplemented with a bit of chicory I found the other day and finally managed to dry and roast properly.

"I bloody well killed ten people, Severus, did you expect it to make me more handsome?"

It's the first time he's mentioned it other than his confession, and his words tear something inside me. Another part of me licks at the jagged edge.

"I lost track of how many deaths I'm responsible for, but it's a lot more than ten."

"Really?" We've not discussed this part of my history much. "What's it like?" He looks at me shyly. "I don't remember."

"It couldn't have been the same for you, Harry. I mostly killed on command. Sometimes out of carelessness." Not for the sport of it, I think, and then mentally smite myself.

"Couldn't you have killed that bastard at any time, like we ended up doing together?"

"I suppose so." The tea is poured into the tin cups.

"Why didn't you?"

"It didn't occur to me."

He snorts, grabs his tea, and goes stumbling into the dark. Alone by the fire, I track the frenetic movements of his magic until it stills, and he sleeps. I entertain myself thinking of what Shanti is doing, or Rukmini, or Andre or Mick or Dumbledore. Then I move to the wizards and witches at Gregor's bar, and after that start trying to conjure up some of the muggles I knew at school, but my inability to care about them makes me feel desolate, so I sleep.

In the middle of the night, Harry comes to me, shivering in the unseasonably cool September night. I don't move. It takes a few minutes, but I wait for the magic to happen between us. I lay there with his sleeping body wrapped around mine, awake, content.

He wakes up and I feel his whole body harden into stone.

"What's for breakfast?" he asks sourly because he's dependent on my magic for the fire. They gave us with some muggle matches but Harry used them all up immediately in his discovery that he has no idea how to build a campfire without magic. His lighter is reserved for the sacred act of smoking his pipe.

"Porridge. We still have some preserved milk left."

Breakfast ensues while I am careful not to look at him, for fear I'll set him off like my gaze did yesterday.

Harry helps himself to some porridge and accepts the mug of tea. He grunts when he tastes the chicory that helps scratch his itch for coffee.

Then he lights his pipe using a stick warmed in the embers.

Thus begin the long hours until the next meal.

As something non-magical to do I'm combing my hair. Harry can hardly fault me for that project. Maybe he'll even offer to help. While my hands work I look at the sky, wondering what our new home's sky will be like.

"Am I that disgusting that you can't look at me?" The kettle is kicked over and clatters against the stone floor.

"No, Harry, I was—"

"You don't touch me anymore. You just lie there and try to ignore me when I touch you. You're over me, you're over men, which is it? You're here out of duty or honor or some such rot. How very unwizardlike of you. Did she teach you that?"

"We will speak of her at some point, but not today. You are upset."

"Yes, I bloody well am—I've lost everything. I'm twenty-four and I've ruined my life. And ten other people's lives. I'm a monster, and the monster I'm stuck with doesn't even love me anymore. You never did. You were just a heterosexual waiting to happen."

The rain of blows goes on outside my shield until he gets so enraged by the lack of contact that he starts hitting himself and "Why, Severus," turns into simply, "Why?"

I fold myself over him so he can't hurt himself. The gold begins to show itself in the middle of all the rot and the mud. The way it always does for us. If only the shine would wear off or turn to brass! It might be easier for us to not see the contrast with the rest of our lives. But there it is, beginning to warm us, eternally new, our desire.

He's cursing himself, saying the most terrible things that I could never believe about him no matter how much darkness overtakes him.

"I'm worse than Voldemort! I know—I looked into his mind. No one ever cared about him, but I had plenty of people who cared about me. No one else is strong enough to anchor me, Severus. No one but you. I unravel when I'm by myself. What kind of a man can't live with himself? It was even before Voldemort. There was never anybody who made me make sense to myself, Severus. Nobody except for you. There's a part of me that always wanted to show them, really show them that I wasn't the hero they wanted me to be—"

And I withdraw my hand for just a second.

In that moment I see him teetering on the edge of complete dissolution, and I realize— I've never actually done anything of consequence. My attempt to save Harry has failed miserably. My research has come to naught. No matter what Lessmore said about my supposed healing gift, I've never really healed anyone. Never saved a life. Never done anything besides temporarily relieve a rash or lust or the need to disguise oneself.

My hand returns to Harry. His shoulder turns to gold under my touch. His arm, his hand. I'm careful to keep him in my gaze, because otherwise he will slip into what he is seeing inside himself.

"Remember this? Remember with me," I rehearse everything we know about each other.

Besides my skill in manufacturing my superficial potions, there's really only one thing I know how to do.

I reach my hand to turn his chest into gold, and it's as though I hold his heart in my hand, his pulse like a bird's, racing, just about to take flight. If I don't keep a hold of him, he's a dead man. The ministry would never execute him but our dead have a way of making us pay all the same.

All of the vanished are clamoring just on the other side of our flesh, but our joined skin keeps them out

Either I can pity him or study him, as I have so often before, and if I do, he'll slip through my fingers,and fall into the abyss. He'll die. Somehow. Or I can meet the dumb animalistic rage at being corralled in this self that he doesn't recognize, in this fate that feels like a stranger's, the way all fates do. And maybe we'll be able to hang on to a piece of purgatory while everything is trying to send us to hell.

"Don't let it be real. Tell me it's not real. Fix it, Severus. You can do anything."

"Ssh, I am fixing it. Feel this."

Suddenly he looks down to his now-hated sex, and he gags to see me touch it.

"I didn't want this, I didn't want any of it. I just wanted to be happy, to work and to come home to you at the end of the day. It's all spoiled, I'm ruined, don't touch me."

He wrenches himself away.

Don't you remember this? This is ours. No one has ever been able to reach us here.

His chest, his stomach, his back are gold.

The most pure and malleable metal. We can still do this. His thighs, his buttocks, let me remind you, let me show you the only miracle I know how to perform.

The fact that I can't give to him without stealing from him doesn't matter right now. Harry can't do any magic without his wand and it just underscores that we are two imperfect men limping towards each other on the only avenue left to escape from our loneliness.

Feel this. Follow me where they can't find us.

And I swim and he swims with me, the waves of our body fitting into each other until it is as though we are completely still while we continue our freefall into darkness.

When he cries out it is not an exclamation of wonder or pleasure. It is a gasp in front of the void as he has never been strong enough to look at it before. As he can see it through me without becoming less than himself.

That is my gift to him.

And when it is over, Harry's face is one he shouldn't have worn for decades. His magic has a bruise around the edges. He is a man who fears himself.

He sits there smoking his pipe, naked, brutally naked, as if he'll never have the right to shame again.

"How can you still want me?"

"I just do. You can choose to think of it as a blessing or a curse." We sit in silence. "How can you still want me?" After making love as Julian, Severus seems a very shabby second.

"Can we please deal with your body image problems after I have my turn at going insane?"

"Fair enough."

"What would my mother think of me?"

"There are no two ways about this, my friend, so listen well: your mother would never judge you."

"Did you sleep with my mother?"

I choke for a good minute.

"Your mother and I had a very special relationship that I did not turn out as you are thinking."

Thankfully, he accepts this evasion. The terrible thought strikes me—in banishment together, eventually all of my secrets will be his. There will be no way to keep him out—Harry can simply badger me to the end of my sanity and eventually weariness or indifference will make me divulge anything and everything.

We go back to our project of fixing one of the walls. In my mind, however, I'm rehearsing the wards I will put up on one corner of my island so that I can keep at least a few shreds of privacy. My distraction makes me drop one of the rocks I'm levitating.

Harry stares at me after the dust settles.

"Stop looking at me!" I cry.

"It's okay, Severus, you can go mad for a while. It's your turn. I don't mind," he says, his limpid green eyes still looking at me.

"Aaah!" I exclaim and then transfigure into a bird to fly in close loops around the island so the ministry doesn't think I'm trying to escape. When I regain my normal form Harry is looking at me with dissembled indifference. "Thought you left."

"It's nervousness, you know, about where they will put us," is my half-truth.

One morning he rolls over to find me heating a selection of substances in my hand. For a moment his face is the adult version of the eleven-year-old boy I saw for the first time at Hogwarts: a being ruled by a destiny that had not yet turned black. This is the prototype of the face I had hoped to see change over the years by my side.

Then the green eyes harden as if the victims of a sudden, cruel drought, and the rest of the face follows until it looks like it's made of cracked lava—the remnant of what is left when the Harrowing Fire has come and gone.

"You're not wearing it." His eyes bore into my midsection where my liver is surprised in its slow transit back down to its normal site now that the corset is not in place.

"Oh, yes, well, the corset was something just for us," I mumble, but my real feeling is clear, and Harry translates it correctly as "something just for you."

"You mean you'd wear something that made you look like, like a freak, just because I asked you to?"

There doesn't seem to be a good answer to this question, so I keep silent.

"You'd do anything for a lay, you slut. I'd never let someone make me into something that wasn't me just to get some."

A silence.

"Well at least I'm not the one who knew there was a dark wizard messing around in my life and didn't think long and hard about any possibility that I might be under his influence before trying to get laid."

A silence.

"But I was only 17 when you acted like Voldemort's henchman and started messing with my mind!"

"I was only 17 when I took the Mark. Sixteen when over half the boys at Hogwarts used me as their plaything."

He's thrown off his stride. Harry's not used to me answering back.

"You left me!" He says to get back on solid ground.

"That I did." There's no denying my role in precipitating the murders.

"Because you were in love with that woman."

"Possibly."

"If you'd just stayed out in the woods and never came back to Hogwarts nothing would have ever happened!"

Never has Harry erased me so completely from his history. He's never gone so far as to wish me dead.

"I would have killed that bastard anyway, on my own time. Maybe I would have gotten together with Edgar Singh. Maybe we'd still be together now. I would have gone to a wizard school for an advanced degree and there would have been no humiliating trial that separated me from my friends, and I'd be happy, you monster, you wouldn't have infected my life!"

It's easy to see that Harry is constructing something to hold onto against the awareness of his crimes that is pressing on his vulnerable system. I'm the only person around—even if I hadn't played some role in his hurts he would have found something to be angry with as long as it wasn't himself.

At first I try to just listen. Then I go back to experimenting with salves he refuses to use and that I turn into a vapor using the makeshift pelican of my two hands.

At some point while he rants himself hoarse I catch myself calculating the volume of Harry's body if it were to displace an Evermort solution at 500 fluid drams.

Finally I take to being Harry's fire-keeper, making sure there is a campfire lit, though he is getting better with the muggle matches, and eating berries and roots elsewhere on the island, often transfigured as a bird.

One night I am one owl among several on a tall tree not far from the armory where Harry sleeps. Everything is easier to deal with using my owl-eyes and from a height of several yards in the air. So it takes me some time to register that the sounds coming out of Harry's mouth are different than his usual nightmare noises, and that his body is thrashing about more violently.

"Harry, Harry wake up," my hands still have a few traces of feathers when I'm by his side a moment later.

It takes me several more moments to realize that he isn't shivering against me, but rather moving with rather more intent.

"This is not a good idea," I say, moving away.

"What am I supposed to do then?" He flings himself on his back. "It's not like there's anyone else."

"Something less than your usual romantic attitude," I can't resist retorting. "Usually you manage to make it sound more like a privilege than a sentence when you say, 'Oh, Severus, you're the only one.'"

"It is a sentence, bitch," Harry throws away the blanket. "You think I wanted to have my sexual response limited to one person for my whole life?"

"What's this? Your eyesight seems just fine when it comes to other men."

"I can't do it, Severus. I've never been able to do it with anyone else but you. And fat lot of good that does me when you refuse to sleep with me!"

Hundreds of half-remembered comments about Harry's lonely and difficult times before I returned to his life fall into place. He really had no choice—Voldemort's particular combination of fetishes would be replicable by no one except someone who had already been exposed to them. It was me or no one.

"Why did you never tell me this?"

"Because I knew you would think I was just being with you because I couldn't—function—with anyone else."

"Well, that seems to be the case." Doors are shutting right and left in my mind. Things that were ours now seem like rote determinism. A foolish thing to be worrying about under the circumstances.

"My therapist said that it was because I couldn't find someone who had a foot in both worlds—all the kinky stuff I like and all the things I believe in as a person. She kept telling me to keep looking, so I spent a lot of time doing that—looking."

There's an odd intonation to the last word. "You mean in bars?" I hazard.

He laughs shortly. "Not necessarily. I used to take Polyjuice and then find guys who would do things in front of me. Usually I paid them in aphrodisiac potions." He interprets my look of horror correctly as a concern that these strong compounds were being passed off to systems they'd not been tested on. "Not muggles. There are plenty of wizard perverts; I don't know why you always think you're the only one."

"And where did you obtain this Polyjuice and these stimulants?"

"Money can buy anything, Severus. You know that. Though the quality was much below that of your potions."

A black taste floods my tongue.

"And when did you discover that, precisely?"

He makes a dismissive gesture.

"When did you first begin pilfering my potions, stupid boy?" My anger always tends to activate the old schoolmaster in me.

"The first time I saw you at your cottage," he mumbles.

The audible intake of my breath is the only sound for several long moments.

"So you didn't really come to save my life? You just happened to show up a few minutes before I walked into the sea, when really it was your plan to sack a dead man's house for all the potions your depraved imagination requires?"

"That's not true!" Harry's hand closes on a wand that isn't there.

"So it was a crime of opportunity, then. "

"Yes, I knew what Polyjuice looked like, and Twin-thistle Elixir. You were still asleep, so I took some just in case."

This is hardly the time for a lecture about the stupidity of judging a potion by its color, so I restrain myself. "In case of what?"

"In case you left me."

There's no meeting his eyes when he looks at me like that.

"But I was ordering huge amounts of elemental phosphorous the whole time we were in Paris," I suddenly object. "That's in all of my potency compounds. You were stealing this extra little 'insurance' all this time?"

His hands fling about awkwardly without his wand. "I'm not like you, all right, Severus? I'm not old."

"You have many times complained that my appetites were greater than yours, my young friend."

"I mean that you've had lots of other people—" he holds up his hand to stave off my objection, "whether you consider them to be romantic partners or not. I've never been able to be with anyone else, Severus. I've been practically promised to you since I was 17, which is really young to settle on someone. I'm a normal bloke," his eyes dare me to dissent. "I like things, I want things. I want to see what it would be like with other blokes. I wasn't touching any of them!" He pauses. "I wouldn't touch anyone in a place like that."

"So courtly of you to refrain from manhandling your bought pleasures before returning to my bed."

"Well at least I wasn't gallivanting around town with a muggle lady, who I distinctly remember as hanging on your arm."

"I did not lay a hand on Shanti before you and I had broken it off, nor did I consciously realize I wanted to."

"'Consciously'? You don't get to claim that you did anything unconsciously. I'm the one with dissociation!

"So you're the only one that can make mistakes or be anything less than one hundred percent self-knowing? Par le Trismégeste, Harry, you can be thick sometimes."

Before he can respond I hold up my hand. "You knew you had a tendency to dissociate? These therapists of yours just let you wander around 'watching' men with this problem?"

He looks guilty. "I don't know if they understood what I meant by 'look but don't touch.' They just knew that I would look back over my internet history sometimes and find some things that I don't remember doing. Things I don't remember buying. They always said it was because my sexual fantasies were so much the opposite of what my conscious self would accept, sometimes that part of me had to find satisfaction without the rest of me. But everyone kept assuring me this magic guy was out there somewhere for me, and there was, but he left me."

How can I reproach him for not making other arrangements besides the fragile cease-fire attained when he was with me? Everything I said and did with him was to say that we'd be together forever.

"Just because you don't trust people ever, doesn't mean I don't," Harry lashes out as if he read my thoughts. "How was I supposed to know you'd just kick me out of your life because of something some muggle scan said? 'I'm sorry, Harry, but there's nothing that could make me care what a muggle thought.'" He caricatures my voice to repeat those words I can scarcely remember saying.

"How could you—" he's beginning again.

"If you could have—performed—with another man, would you have?"

"Why, I, I don't know. I've never had the choice."

"So you might have, let's say, taken a break from me and explored other avenues with these fine specimens of manhood."

He is stonily silent.

"My great defender of sexual diversity, you just don't like that I disrupted your little 'us versus them, deviants versus the normals' worldview you've so lovingly nurtured all this time. Or are you really a misogynist? Because that's one thing your mother would have had no sympathy for."

The argument is lost on this Harry whose face is turning purple.

"Did you and my—"

"Your mother left me as she came to me, a virgin—" and it comes out with a truthful sound that I hope will silence his questioning forever. Harry never has to know who Lyle was. I fly off to calm myself.


	61. Chapter 61

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 61: The Shape of Prison

_Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward,  
><em>_But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail;  
><em>_Whoe'er keeps me, let my heart be his guard;  
><em>_Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail:  
><em>_And yet thou wilt; for I, being pent in thee,  
><em>_Perforce am thine, and all that is in me._

_From Sonnet CXXXIII._

This little exchange has Harry and me avoiding each other for days. I'm flying circles around the island when the two jailers appear again. By the time I'm on the ground and in human form they and Harry are turning to leave.

"What's the meaning of this? The agreement was that Harry and I would go together wherever you send us."

"Relax, Alkahest, they need an official statement, is all."

"And why should I trust the likes of you?" I stall, trying to reach into their minds and divine their true intentions.

"You're welcome to come with us to the ministry, if you like," Jim offers. "Sure they'll make you most comfortable while you wait for Harry's business."

Damn them. "If they don't return you in one piece I'll poison their dreams until they go mad," I promise to Harry.

"Thanks, love," he says and in a moment they are gone.

TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENT FROM HARRY JAMES POTTER, IN CHAMBERS

CONFIDENTIAL: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION!

IN ATTENDANCE:

VINCENT BARTHOLOMEW: Adjudicator, British Ministry Of Magic;

DR. ESMERALDA MCCORMICK: Court-Appointed psychoneutic practitioner, former therapist for the prisoner; and

ROBERT BASKERVILLE: Bailiff

ADJUDICATOR: Is the quill recording?

BAILIFF: Yes, yes it is, sir.

A: Show the prisoner the image so that we may determine the Veritaserum has taken effect.

HARRY POTTER: Are you all happy?

A: Pardon?

H: Now that everything's gone to shit and you can congratulate yourselves for saying all along that Severus and I wouldn't work out. Are you bloody satisfied?

DR. ESMERALDA MCCORMICK: I think we can dispense with the picture; the Veritaserum seems to be working.

A: Now, Mr. Potter, we are here to get a better idea of what happened. Maybe you've… acquired…a mistaken idea of what occurred. No one here, no one anywhere, wants you to pay for a crime you didn't commit.

H: I did everything I was supposed to! I had a therapist in Paris, I studied hard, I went out and met people for a change, and sometimes it worked! Sometimes I forgot about everything for a little while. But I was stupid because the whole time it was growing inside me like a cancer and everything I touched was destroyed and Severus could see it, he saw it in me and that's why he fell out of love with me.

(Panting) He left. He left. How could he leave? He left.

A: I thought you were licensed to dispense Veritaserum, Doctor. Look: you gave him so much your drug is addling his brain. Don't you think he's been through enough? Give him something to calm him down.

D: It's painful for all of us to admit, Sir Adjudicator, but I'd like to submit that it is Harry Potter on trial today, not me. And that taking out your emotions on me is not only counterproductive, it's unfair, as I was the one who said Veritaserum was inappropriate in this case.

A: And I'd like to submit, Dr. McCormick, that you should turn your healing arts on your patient, who was obviously not well-served by them when you were treating him.

D: (Unintelligible). Here, Harry, drink this.

H: What's in this? I won't drink it unless Severus says it's okay.

D: it has a mild calmative made from cypress bark.

H: But what color is it?

D: You can see it's yellow, Harry.

H: No, I mean, what kind of Severus color. He just touches it and he knows if it's all right. He makes everything all right. I won't drink it, I say!

A: Bailiff, cast the Imperius. Doctor, have him drink the potion.

B: (Casts spell).

H: (Slowly) Severus gave me something like this once.

A: Let the record show that Snape gives him intoxicants.

D: What does he give you, Harry?

H: He gives me potions and tonics and love and potions….

A: You gave him too much again.

D: I gave him the minimum dose.

A: Well, give him something else so he makes sense.

D: (Loudly) As a physician I won't stand for it! This young man's insides are, for want of a technical term, turned to jelly, and he can't afford any more trauma. A man's system is not meant to be opened up and slowed down and then sped up again to suit the court's needs.

H: I'm right here! Everyone's always talking about me like this tragedy that doesn't know he's a tragedy. I bloody well know it, all right? I've always known it. I'm so sick of being the one who's fucked up. They're fucked up too—they just don't know it yet.

D: Who Harry?

H: (Muttering) Men, wizards, men.

D: Not all men, surely.

H: What do you know about what men get up to together, bitch? (Claps hands over mouth). I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, doctor.

D: So tell me about Severus. What sort of a man was he to you?

H: Severus was the only one who didn't look at me different. He's been looked at like a freak all his life, too. That's why we got along so well. And then he started, he started LOOKING at me, like, watching me for the next thing that would go wrong and the next thing I might do. And I couldn't stand it, so sometimes I would go out and—"

D: And what?

H: I just liked to watch. I couldn't do anything. You know I'm not capable.

A: Is this true?

D: Yes. I tried several magical treatments including potions, and but the problem remained with all but one exception—

H: He's not an exception. He's my boyfriend. And you're going to put me on an island somewhere and he's going to LOOK at me like that forever and there won't be any escape. It's torture, coming from him: he was supposed to be the one that understood. He's always making me do things.

A: Let the record show that Mr. Potter, er, the prisoner, does not wish to be exiled with the Alkahest.

H: What? You can't separate us! I'll kill myself. You can't keep us apart; haven't you all done enough? Running us to the ground like rats and shutting us out in the cold because nobody can stand to see us together.

D: What does he make you do, Harry?

H: Everything became part of a project, this big experiment with me as the guinea pig. He hassles me about smoking and alcohol and my diet and he makes me practice my verb tenses in French. (Lapses into French)

D: We're speaking English now, all right?

H: All right.

D: So if you were with Severus, why did you go looking at other men? That was dangerous; you must have known that.

H: I thought I was safe because I could only really be with Sev.

A: (Unintelligible)

D: So then, what happened if you were living the life you wanted?

H: Nothing happened! (Convulses, then says in a new voice) I saw what they were crying for and that I was the one to give it.

I knew what they wanted. I could see what they couldn't. In the darkest part of their mind, underneath their laundered shirts and their robes. They weren't free. They were crying for it. That's what they were crying for. To be the crawling worms they craved to be. Not the pain. The pain is walking around like they do with all that power and not doing anything of consequence.

You don't know what power is until you walk around with a wand you can't use. When you're not a wizard anymore because all the magic has run out of you like a leaky vessel, and you see people casting spells like nothing, all because of who you love.

D: You've told me many times, Harry, that this harmful situation with Severus was your choosing.

H: (Ferociously) I didn't choose anything. It was all out of my control.

A: Did he force you or hurt you in some way?

H: Yes! YES! Write that down. Let the record show…

D: All right, Harry, what did he do?

H: (Screaming) He left me!

A: And why did he do you this great kindness so late?

H: He used this PET scan—a muggle machine for showing the inside of the body—and looked inside himself and it showed he was dead.

A: That would explain a lot.

D: I've known that for some time.

H: Severus is dead? You killed him while you kept me here with your potions? You lied to me! You said we could be together, just us! You bastards, you fucking— (Jumps out of chair and advances on the Adjudicator)

A: Bailiff, please administer Petrificus to his limbs.

B: (Casts spell)

D: Was that really necessary?

A: It's for his own good. I can't very well ignore an assault a man commits while being recorded in an official transcript.

H: I'm not a man. (Sobs). I'm not a man, I never was and not now, not ever… (Weeps for some time)

A: All right, Bailiff, I think he may safely be released from the charm.

H: Not ever... (Buries face in hands).

D: Remember, we've talked about this a great deal, Harry. You are a man, and those ten people you killed, they were men, too.

H: No they weren't, they were cunts! You didn't see how they wallowed in their shame until it was too late.

A: You can't, you can't give him something to make him talk like himself, or his other self, or however this thing works?

D: I wish I could. During his treatment I thought that Harry's trauma left his life with a crater as if hit by an asteroid. A lack of certain things, like the ability to achieve intimacy, or function to his true potential professionally. I could never have guessed that he was left with this extra thing, like a seed from a poisonous plant.

What I said before about his insides turning to jelly wasn't far from the truth. We're all familiar with diseases that turn the inside to liquid and are usually undetected until the person's organs are practically gone. Dilaborating Cacoethes is one of the more common.

A: Yes, I lost a cousin to that. Dreadful business. You're saying his brain is turning to liquid? We could intern him in a hospital.

D: Is that what you want, Harry?

H: Would Severus be there?

A: I'm sure they'd find something worth studying in that—Alkahest.

D: Your friends could come visit. You'd get proper treatment.

H: Could we share a room?

A: That would be out of the question.

H: I don't think we have anything more to discuss. (Tries to stand, stumbles, and sits).

A: There are a few more administrative questions

H: (In new voice). I'd say there are a few questions. Like why you prefer those magazines with pictures of muggle women, the filthy parts of the filthy mudbloods you claim to abhor but excite you so. I think it's because you like it dirty and you're scared to death of that slit. They're the only women who can do it for you at all, you worm.

A: (Clears throat) He's totally off his rocker.

B: See here, you—

H: (Turns on Bailiff) And you, your preferred brand of slut is more to my taste. Paid diversions are the neatest, I agree. They'll let you do anything to them, have you noticed? Meek as lambs, they are at heart.

D: Harry, I know you're doing this to show how badly you've been hurt, to get some type of acceptance by letting us all see this part of you, but we really—

A: And the slag speaks. You don't think I can tell how you like it when—

B: Mutis totalis!

D: Thank you, Bailiff.

B: I know that wasn't by the book, sir.

A: No you did right, well done.

H: (Reveals himself).

B: By Merlin, that's his—

A & B utter together: Petrificus!

D: Of all the stupidity! (Rushes to prisoner, half-undressed and inert on the ground) Don't you ignoramuses know that two simultaneous doses of Petrificus will stop a heart?

(Busies herself with spells)

H: What have you done to me? Who's been trying to lay a hand on me? Severus will kill you, he will, only he can do that, protect me like that, except he doesn't want to anymore. (Sobs.)

D: Well, at least you can say that the one good outcome of this testimony is that you didn't manage to kill the prisoner. What was so important for you to raise your wands on him together-because he had raised his at you? You think I haven't seen a thousand males' bodies in my medical training? Or were you concerned about something else?

A: Madam doctor, if you knew how to treat the man's subtle parts, as you were bound to do, rather than give a show of how to deal with his—overt—parts, then perhaps we wouldn't be here today.

B: Sir.

A: And furthermore, stop preening yourself. With or without your help, he would have come round. I've seen prisoners—

B: Sir.

A: What is it?

B: May I turn it off?

A: What?

B: The quill, may I—?

(End of transcript).

Just before nightfall Harry comes back under Imperius with Jim and Freddy. I can tell from yards away that they've given him more than Veritaserum. And that they did right. His magic is so chaotic I wouldn't have even recognized it as Harry's. And his face. His face looks like it's wrongly attached to his head.

It's unbearable to look at what's left of Harry, so my eyes rest on those of the guards. We stare at each other.

"I'm sorry," Freddy says unexpectedly. "Snape, if I'd have known what kind of a shape they'd leave him in I wouldn't have taken him."

I put my arm around Harry and banish the hex. "Harry?"

"They got it all right, they got it. I told them a thing or two or three or four."

"I hope you did," I reply calmly but the guards recognize the look in my eye for what it is and tense their hands on their wands. "Did they manage to convince themselves their consciences are clear? Or have they pretended that a whole society's war hasn't been fought inside one man's head for the last four years so they could go on with business as usual?"

"They're not quite there but working on it," Harry says very clearly and faints in my arms.

"They'll have us come for you eventually," Jim promises as if they're as excited about that prospect as I am. They grasp the portkey that spins them away.

Harry runs a fever that night, and luckily there's a supply of yarrow that brings it down. With his temperature near normal I lie down.

Abruptly I'm at the end. My end. My own melancholia is pulling me into its sure embrace.

Harry wakes up because it's cold. I've let the fire go out.

"I'm cold Sev. Sev? I'm cold."

He shakes me until I come back to myself light the fire.

It's the prospect of testifying before these people. They can tell as many lies as they want to about me, but I don't want to be the puppet nodding my complicity while they do it. Harry toasts some of the bread the guards slipped him, and we have dry toast dipped in tea.

We lie back down and stare at the sky for what seems like ages.

There's no need to touch. The air is thick with us and our fate.

Harry goes back to sleep. He sleeps all day. Nature forces him to get up several times because whatever mercenary potions master brewed that Veritaserum might as well have done it with his feet. It's obviously got Harry's kidneys all upset. But then he goes right back to sleep every time. At last I place the way he is lying there: he's sleeping the way a prisoner sleeps: desperately clinging on to unconsciousness, to the only thing that has some unpredictability to it. I watch the outer husk of his dreams and seriously consider not being there when he wakes. Not to leave him, but to spare him being condemned alongside a man who's finished.

When Harry finally gets up for good it's dark again and I'm poking at the potatoes in the coals.

We eat.

"You're not going to go make a statement, are you?"

"No, I'm not." The strength of my voice reassures him.

"There'll be a fuss." He lights his pipe.

"In my experience, there's always a fuss." I bring out some berries I found earlier. "Does your lower back hurt?"

"Like an ogre walked on it."

I rub his back. "That's one benefit of refusing to cooperate: I spare myself the inelegant brews they pass off as potions." I rub some more.

"Is that why you're not going?"

The night isn't that cold. The sky is a warm, friendly black.

"I just don't have it in me, that's all. People have looked at me through a microscope my whole life. They can lock me up, but they can't make me their scapegoat."

Harry looks up in admiration. "Wish I'd thought of that."

"Watch and see; it's not going to be that simple."

In the wee hours of the morning the spell is on me before I can open my eyes.

Somewhat lessened by cloaking magic, the magic of the two jailers, Freddy and Jim, makes itself known: dark green and lavender, respectively.

They probably used an invisibility spell as well, but it doesn't matter now: they've blinded me.

"We've learned a thing or two in Azkaban," Jim's voice comes out of nothing. "Come quietly now and you won't find out what else we have in store."

The jailer's tone tells me he hopes I do give them trouble. They've doubtless spent many a night, the guards, boasting about how they would bring down the Alkahest.

My limbs grow into the earth. "You'll have to take the island with me."

"You might as well give up," Harry's voice says proudly.

And I give them a contest that will make them the toast of Azkaban.

They use Scindere to separate me from the ground. With my feet still trailing roots I turn into a (blind) bird. Flying into blackness is one of the most terrifying things I have ever done.

"To the right, no to the left!" Harry shouts, but I've always had an unerring feel for water, so once I'm over that I fly circles high in the air, beyond the reach of most people's wands, until I calculate they're bored.

As soon as I come closer to the ground they try Gravisius, and my now-weighty body plummets towards the earth.

"No!" Harry shouts.

With the smell of the ground and all its mixed magics coming up fast I turn into a spider and land lightly and proceed to crawl in an unknown environment with my heart in my throat until a nice leaf crackles above me. Being plastered as a spider is not my idea of a good death.

Footsteps thunder near me and I try to burrow into the dirt.

The words are distorted by my spider hearing, so I don't know what's happening until a dark green magic lifts me up out of the ground.

"Didn't realize we had your signature, did you?" The words finally assemble themselves in my mind.

No I didn't! Without the defense of my nearly untrackable magic I feel exposed.

"I know you don't want to travel like this, so turn yourself into yourself and come along quietly," Freddy says.

A blind hippogriff is still nothing to sneeze at. The sheer size of the beast that I turn into snaps the slender thread of magic the jailer had directed at the spider.

Perhaps breathing fire was laying it on a little thick, but these guards need something to talk about at night.

"You can see there is going to be a change in your plans," I say a few times before I realize that I'm speaking in hippogriff.

My last transfiguration is to a man thirty feet tall. A blind man, still, but at least I can communicate.

"You can see there's going to be a change of plan," I repeat.

"All right, let's call it a draw," a voice from around my ankle floats up to me. "You must admit that blinding spell is rock solid."

When I regain my proper size, prepared for another trick, Jim points his wand at me and removes the blinding spell.

"That was ripping!" Harry exclaims, throwing his arms around me.

If I could distract him from his fate for a few minutes it was worth it.

"Not bad for an Alkahest," Freddy allows.

"I always thought the Azkaban jailers were just there to tend to the Dementors," I admit, brushing myself off. "But then I don't remember my stay at all."

"Well now, we can say you put up a fight, and it won't be a lie."

"They monitor our wands, you see. Easier to tell when an employee gets over-enthusiastic."

"Or breaks someone out."

These men have the unnerving habit of finishing each other's sentences. Will Harry and I get like that?

"So one of 'em predicted as much and prepared a statement for you to sign." Jim draws an envelope from his pocket.

"I will sign nothing," I declare, arms folded.

"I think you'd be most interested in reading this."

Jim hands me the papers at the same time that Freddy says, "Harry, I have something for you. Papers to sign, and something else."

Harry is accepting a much thicker stack of papers and opening a pouch to discover a flint rock, while Jim shows me a note.

_So that Harry will think nothing is amiss, just sign anything you want on this paper, it will be discarded. The enclosed is for your eyes only._

The guard is handing me the quill.

"Mene, Mene, Tecelphares,**" my suddenly unsteady hand writes.

"Your receipt, Alkahest," Jim says familiarly and I wonder if they've been practicing their offensive spells against a picture of me for years.

Transfiguring into a bird, I fly with the papers in my beak to the tallest tree and then turn back into a man so I can read the blank pages that fill with a clear black script, two clear scripts, in my hands. Yes, they do have my magical signature.

The top document says:

Dear Mr. Snape:

You do not know me, though you know of my existence, I'm sure. But I know a great deal about you. Knowing Harry and his tendency to compartmentalize, he surely hasn't even told you my name. I am Esmeralda McCormick, mediwitch and licensed psychoneutic practitioner, and I treated Harry for four years-while you were in the asylum and before he moved to France.

You have been around the healing arts enough to know that my writing to you like this is highly irregular. If someone had told me I would ever be writing on a personal basis behind any patient's back, I wouldn't believe it. My guild would have me on the street for this. But then, Harry Potter is not just any patient, and this situation is completely beyond my experience. I wish it had stayed as such.

And up until the sad chain of events came to light a few days ago, I never thought that you and I might have anything to say to each other.

For Harry post-Voldemort, everything has always been, and will always be, confused. More specifically, confused with you—what he felt about you, what he was tricked into thinking he felt. So when he told me that he was planning on a fresh start in France, and he quickly got set up with a reputable au pair program, I had only my suspicions that his choice of destinations had something to do with you. Yet I could see that only a gilded cage was waiting for Harry in Britain—everyone praising him for saving society and no one wanting to hear of the realities of his struggles. Even if my worst fears were true, if he could just get you out of his system and see that you weren't the answer to all his many problems…

But once he was gone, he was gone. You know there's no reciprocity between the French and British wizard medical systems, of course, but I did know that he was seeing another counselor continuously from the time he left my care until the time of his arrest. By which time he was back in the British system, but not cared for by the Ministry of Magic, where I practice.

They say it is one of the Mercies of my profession that my first loyalty is to my patient and I can't grasp the full reality of the pains and other contexts that might have made you harm Harry the way that you did when he was your student. But now, like it or not, you're his caregiver in banishment for years to come, and I feel it's only fair to inform you about what may take Harry years to articulate. To that end I have enclosed the transcript of Harry's statement. So that you may know the shape of your prison, as it were.

It occurs to me that you may see this caregiving role as the continuation of your relationship up until this point. You may really have felt you were helping him, from the beginning, Maybe this justification is what helps you live with yourself—stunting a life out of a desire to help?

The human mind is capable of all sorts of delusion, in my experience. But if there is one thing we share, I believe it's a sincere heartbreak at the deterioration of Harry's psyche, and its violent results.

If he failed where I sincerely thought such a strong and brave young man would succeed… Perhaps I was wrong in letting him think it was possible to start over in France; that he could ever leave any of his painful legacy behind. But I think this hero was the victim of a systematic decimation of his personality such as I have never seen. It's as though bombs of unhealth were buried inside him, hidden for years until the right thing set them off. And I have come to believe that Harry's insistence that "Severus is too stupid about people things to have done all of this" is actually correct. The Boy Who Lived survived until he was felled by an act of war, a war that has never truly ended for him.

What would we have done if his unstable psyche had been known to us? Harry would have been cordoned off like those fields ruined by landmines after muggle wars. This bright, engaging young man would have had to be placed in a controlled environment to prevent all eventualities. You know these places. Should our loyalty have been to the one half or the other of Harry Potter?

These are all things I do not know, but will haunt me for the rest of my professional life, if that isn't another casualty to this tragedy. But one thing I do know, Mr. Snape, is that if for Harry's sake I am heartbroken about his exile, on another level it doesn't seem right that you should have exclusive access to your victim forever. As someone who knows the role you played in Harry's young life, I've often considered what punishment you deserve. Let's just say you seeing what this young man has become every day for the rest of your life might be exactly what you deserve.

You may think I am too harsh. But there is another thing I blame you for, a grown man with an intimate knowledge of the healing arts. You never sought out your own practitioner. There are no records of you ever seeking out psychoneutic help, though Harry has related countless hurts you've endured in your life. Did it never occur to you to actually speak to someone at that asylum instead of running out the door as quickly as you could walk? Or when you started infiltrating Harry's mind with filth I fully believe could spring from you yourself, the plaything at the court of the Dark Lord over years?

If you had ever thought to take this very sensible step you would probably recommend for anyone else, an objective opinion would have told you to stay clear of your victim's life after you avoided prosecution for your crimes. That there was no possible way for things to end well between you.

In such a scenario, you would have had your own advocate in court. I would have been subjected to one of the very difficult conversations that occur within my profession: two practitioners bound by an oath to speak for their patient's fate, and cloaked by a Mercy that prevented them from looking either to the right or the left while they did it.

Harry has told me a great deal about magical society's rejection of you, so don't think I'm unaware of how glad the asylum was to be rid of you, how you've been treated like a monster in the press. But because you were too proud or too frightened or too suspicious to let someone else look at your fate with you, unflinchingly, you became the worst of what people predicted for you.

There is more that I could say about you, Mr. Snape, but my opinion of you doesn't matter anymore. Now it's all over and you're going to be the only one in Harry's world, and that changes everything. You will be Harry's only society, and I hope you treat him more wisely than the Wizarding World did, and that, for Harry's sake, he disintegrates no further.

You will see in the transcript: his mind is a building that is one plank away from total collapse. We both know that your arts can't be taken away from you, so perhaps you can find something that will make it easier for him to live with what happened.

So in closing, I find myself in the strange situation in which Severus Snape is the only one who can understand how angry I am. That you deserve at least some part of this anger is a happy coincidence.

Ever herself,

Dr. Esmeralda McCormick

The version of Harry depicted by the transcript did not surprise me at all. The letter was painful, but no more harsh than how I judge myself of a quiet evening.

I think what did it was the fumbling.

These adjudicators and assorted court personnel have a carapace thicker than a Barometer Beetle's. It's all a great spectacle for them, judging people's lives, a play of justice and retribution. There are rumors of people laying bets on the prisoners' fates.

The transcript revealed a part of Wizarding Society that I'd never hoped to be let into. They lost their hero. Irremediably. The adjudicator would have ignored those deaths if he could, just to keep the Boy Who Lived ensconced in his proper place among the warriors of our kind.

From atop my branch the birds call out their jests about my having remained in human form at the top of a tree, and the kaleidescope that is Harry's downfall shifts before my eyes yet again. The untrusting wizard culture had one shining hope it allowed itself to believe in, and it's having to let it, let Harry, go.

I fly down to our camp and see Harry has made a slingshot out of an elastic our jailers left along with a stack of bank papers he has to examine and then sign over his property to the Ministry. Mine, they just seized, but then, they don't know about the multiple hidden accounts both Harry and I possess.

For a moment you wouldn't know anything terrible has come to pass. Harry is discovering a new skill and he delights at every bird he hits in the head with a rock and adds to the pile by his feet.

It must be because this is like seeing his mother integrating her martial abilities all over again. A tidal wave of emotion crashes over me and I have to hold onto the ruined stone wall.

"You try, Severus!"

"You know I am useless with anything requiring dexterity. I like watching you."

I don't even use my magic to light the fire, because Harry has his new flint. When the tin dish of roast bird is placed before me, Harry is hurt by my refusal to even try it.

I haven't eaten fowl since they started talking to me.

But the island's birds think I eat some.

Perfect.

In no time at all they're spreading the rumor that I'm a killer of their kind. The only society I have ever felt at home in thinks I'm a traitor.

Harry and I drink tea (his, black tea with a sprig of mint, mine, Black Taste) and watch the fire. He is unusually calm, but all I can hear are the accusations raining down on me of being a traitor to the birds by consuming their flesh. It makes me want to jump up and protest my innocence, but this strange lethargy that has been gaining on me since reading that letter has me sprawling heavily in our shelter.

By a certain logic, the birds are right to count Harry's meal as my meal, the way my crimes have fueled his.

I can sense the ooze of the bird-blood that feels like more of a murder than those ten men Harry butchered, knowing it will be flowing to me inexorably while he sleeps, coloring me with death, forcing the flesh's taste across my tongue.

The same way his magic is always flowing into me, feeding my unnatural appetites.

"You've been quiet since they left. What did they make you sign? A bunch of lies?"

"It was very fair actually. I can't object."

We lay down together and Harry holds me. Normally I would be stupidly grateful for this gesture, but this night, his touch makes me feel like screaming.

This handsome young man is the shape of my prison. And I am his. My shape is one that he is programmed to desire, so he doesn't feel the walls closing in.

I lie there and call on every mental trick I know not to push him away in disgust.

We are going to be banished.

Banished.

The most acute psychological pain I have ever felt has me burning in a black fire. I am not ten feet away, safe in some homey catatonia. I am but an inch away, two inches at most. I can see everything, feel everything heightened as if by some sense-stimulating potion. I'm boiling in my consciousness that shows no signs of ceasing.

Who would have thought hell was so close?

Banished.

My early readings of Shakespeare sponsored by Miss Bundle start words bounding around in my head:

_Some word there was…. I would forget it fain;  
><em>_But, O, it presses to my memory,  
><em>_Like damned guilty deeds to sinners' minds:_

_That 'banished,' that one word 'banished'_

_There is no end, no limit, measure, bound,  
><em>_In that word's death; no words can that woe sound._

_Ha, banishment! be merciful, say 'death;'  
><em>_For exile hath more terror in his look,  
><em>_Much more than death: do not say 'banishment.'  
><em>_There is no world without Verona walls,  
><em>_But purgatory, torture, hell itself.  
><em>_Hence-banished is banish'd from the world,  
><em>_And world's exile is death: then banished,  
><em>_Is death mis-term'd: calling death banishment,  
><em>_Thou cutt'st my head off with a golden axe,  
><em>_And smilest upon the stroke that murders me._

_The damned use that word in hell;  
><em>_Howlings attend it._

"'Vanished?' What have we lost now? Severus, shut up, I'm trying to sleep."

And I practice, practice, practice being

So still

So silent

That when it comes time to stir in the morning Harry finds that the man he has been embracing all night is a staring wreck of a human.

He jumps back with the natural aversion to the insane.

"You can't go mad now. It'll ruin everything! If they find you like this they'll cart you off to the asylum and then it's Azkaban for me."

As usual, Harry's commonsense logic acts on me like a vitamin I can't naturally metabolize on my own.

"You're right."

And we go back to squabbling and passing the time until our departure.

**And this is the writing that was inscribed: mina, mina, shekel, half-mina. This is the interpretation of the matter: mina, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; shekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; half-mina, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.- Daniel 5:25–28. Featured in Paracelsus.


	62. Chapter 62

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 62: The Weather

Just when we'd stopped thinking of anything but the present the hair stands up on both of our necks. Harry's hand twitches and he curses at the missing wand.

Our jailers have just appeared next to a portkey at the side of the island nearest the armory entrance.

We walk slowly in that direction, united again against the unknown.

"Mr. Potter," Jim and Freddy say together, dedicating a nod in my direction. "You've found the accommodations suitable?"

"Yes, very," Harry says, all politeness. "Better than I deserve, really."

The two grizzled men exchange a dark look. "That's not, we don't, well, some of us chaps, we got together and got you this." They thrust a pouch at Harry.

Harry's face lights up when he opens it. "Tobacco? I thought that wasn't an official ration?"

"That should last you awhile," Freddy says. "You only need a strand or two—it's that long-burning Siberian stuff."

"We wanted to give you something to let you know that some of us think the ministry should have done a bit better by you, Harry." Jim clears his throat.

"His best mate, another guard like us, went off his nut after working surrounded by Dementors and degenerates." Freddy's face reflects a sudden remembrance that I was a prisoner for a time. "You'll pardon the expression. But working there day in and day out will do something to a man. This chap, a good guard, he killed someone and is now a prisoner in the 'Ban," Freddy says with the blunt truthfulness of someone who has never had time for gilding the filth in life. The idea that the guards have a pet name for Azkaban amuses me greatly.

"So it seems your friend Dumbledore convinced everyone you should have a bit of a pension while they're deciding what reparations to give to the- er- families." By the way Jim says "convinced" Harry and I both deduce that some public threat was employed, and we silently share ideas about what lengths the old man might go to in order to see us settled. "Not to worry, the professor is fine, though I think if he were a younger man they might have put him on some sort of list for what he threatened to do."

The other man elbows him, perhaps because they think these observation lists are not known to every single person in the magical world.

"So you should be able to buy what you need where you're going."

"They're not sending us to anywhere with access to trade," I scoff.

"No, but he, you, can order most things on your bimonthly shipments," Freddy includes me for the first time.

"Where are we going?" Harry's voice is tight.

"I can't tell you that, Harry, but let's just put it this way, the wife wouldn't mind taking a vacation there."

They turn their backs as we gather up and shrink the teakettle and a couple of other utensils I take it are not strictly part of the package of what our exile entails but will make our island home a little nicer. Finally the two men withdraw two halves of a portkey, one from each of their pockets.

"You only have to put these halves together and you'll be on your way," says the taller man.

"We hope that you'll be all right," says the shorter man. "There will be some paper to use as an order form in every shipment. We wouldn't mind hearing how you are."

Freddy looks in my general direction and appears to choke on something for a moment. "Make sure nothing happens to him," he finally manages to say. "There are a lot of us that set great store by Harry Potter."

"As do I," I say, "Thank you both for everything, though I can't countenance the tobacco."

Harry grins, the handsome, mischievous savior of the wizarding world for the last time. We grasp the halves of the key and spin off into the unknown, where we will spend the rest of our days.

We reappear on a sandy beach that seems, at first blush, to be paradise.

"This is amazing!" Harry says with relief. He looks up to a flat stone that sits in the middle of a flat area where flowers and grasses tangle together. Tall trees, some with tropical fruits, surround the clearing. "I wonder what's on the other island?" We look to the rocky outpost, smaller, with wilder-looking plants. After a moment Harry makes a noise of frustration. "So they weren't content to take away my wand, but they had to do something to the rest of my magic too?"

"What do you mean?" My senses are picking out the invisible wards meant to keep us in this paradise.

"I can't apparate; that's what I mean. You try it."

It's really quite impressive what they've managed to do in just a few weeks. Perhaps they called in goblins or dwarves or some other species to make the wards more difficult for us to crack. It will take time, perhaps years, but eventually there will be a way out, though I'm not so foolish as to think they don't have some sort of magical monitoring system checking that their two illustrious prisoners are where they are supposed to be. It's a simple technology used in Azkaban and asylums to keep track of inmates and in children's toys like the Marauder's Map Harry inherited from James and Sirius. And they clearly have my signature.

"What are you looking at?" Harry demands, following my eyes to the horizon.

Should I tell him or let him feel like the invisible walls aren't pressing in on us?

"Let me check something," and I fly to the edge of our world, which is farther than I'd care to swim on an average excursion. The fish are swimming tranquilly back and forth across the maze of spells. Kind of them to allow us to have a supply of food while keeping out any possibility of rescue. Flattening my hands against the magical demarcation I force myself close to it.

It throws me backwards and I land in the sea.

By the time I'm back at Harry's side his face is serious.

"The fish can swim in, we just can't swim out."

"How do we get to the other island, then? Our bargain was for two, two that we could use." The thought that we can't very easily complain now crosses both of our minds.

Upon closer inspection, it seems that the network of spells between the two islands is not anywhere near as strong as the one keeping us from leaving our prison. It merely makes apparating impossible, which may prove to be a mercy, I think, as I look forward to thousands of days at the mercy of Harry's changeable moods.

"I think we can swim across." I'm already in my beloved element and preparing to swim towards the rockier island.

Harry is not quite the swimmer that I am, so he begins to follow and then stops.

"Oh, so you want that one, then? Perfect." He turns back towards the greener island and stands on the beach. "Don't even think of setting foot on my island without being invited."

The smaller, rockier one is actually perfect for me. I'm glad of the caves and a lovely trickling stream that bisects the island, drawing from some store of fresh water deep in the earth. It's wilder and there are plants I've never seen before for me to experiment with.

And that's all I do. Set up my own primitive categorization system and begin finding examples in my environment to use as the basic Paracelsan elements for my investigations that pick up where they left off in one of France's premier research facilities.

At the end of two weeks I've scarcely eaten or slept but have the barest necessities for a laboratory. Some fraction of the animal and plant life has been categorized, I've experimented with several basic potions using the local flora and I've made friends with some of the birds and small tree-dwelling animals, who think my Northern hemisphere accent is hilarious. They don't seem to get out much so I don't think the news of my supposed betrayal of their kind is likely to reach them anytime soon.

My mind is totally occupied by trying to fire some primitive pottery using a flame from my hand and a store of chalky mud from the stream-bed, so I don't notice that the edges of my vision have gone purple.

Harry strides up to me still dripping from what must have been a one-armed swim over and thrusts a packet wrapped in a large leaf under my nose.

"Eat it or I'll kill you," he says.

I eat the bits of fruit mixed in with a mashed root that it surprisingly tasty, and he tells me about the field he has cleared, the irrigation system he's working on, the seeds he is going to request in our next shipment. He's learned how to bake cakes out of a certain groundnut with his flint rock and has figured out that one of the herbs that grows plentifully is a rather potent intoxicant.

I look at him for the first time—it's too painful to see him suddenly after two weeks—and notice that his eyes are a little glassy.

"You've been just randomly eating and smoking things without my testing them first?" I grab the pipe and hold my hand over it, sensing the magical properties, and do the same, belatedly, with the food in the leaf.

"Just like you to make something complicated when you can just try the stuff," he snaps. He puts the pipe in my mouth and I inhale.

I'm suddenly one of the luckiest two people in the world to be on these beautiful islands. Harry grins at me and nods. The breeze feels delicious and we watch the spectacular sunset that is almost 360 degrees around us from my little rocky peak I now call home.

I look over at my companion and notice he is picking at something on his left arm. "Did you hurt yourself?" I ask slowly.

"No, it's just something I found by mistake. This resin from a plant stalk stains skin so badly it basically has to grow out. How do you like my tattoo so far?" he asks, showing me the design he has started on his forearm. Just like everything Harry puts his mind to it's handsomely rendered. "Would you still love me if I had tattoos all over?" he asks, and I catch my breath at his unusual use of the word love, which I haven't heard for ages.

"I thought we established we don't have any choice in these matters," and my voice is more bitter than I usually allow it to be with him. "Do you still find me attractive?" I change tack suddenly and surprise myself. It must be the lowered inhibitions from the drug, because this must be the most frivolous thing one could possibly be concerned with, banished to the ends of the earth as we are.

Harry laughs. "You still haven't fixed that reflection problem, have you?" he asks, moving to sit behind me so his legs and arms are wrapped around my body. "You look better to me every day, damn you. I think one of the things that makes me so angry is that I would have fallen in love with you anyway, I would have wanted a life with you anyway, but Voldemort just mixed it all up with terrible things and made us enemies half the time."

It has all the marks of a drug-induced truce, but I'll take it.

His chin is on my shoulder, his beard is prickling my smooth cheek, his hands are maddening my chest in a way he knows very well, and the rest of him is a lean, hard reminder of everything in me that is still alive.

He is whispering French in my ear, "What do you think, baby? What do you think I want?" And he bites my earlobe.

A bilingual lover is twice the lover, in my opinion. At least his schooling was good for something.

We will probably never make love on a bed again, but our bodies seem to thrive rolling around pressed against the earth. It's honest and simple in a way I don't think sex has ever been for either of us—and certainly not what we thought we could hope for after everything going so wrong.

It might be that Harry expended a great deal of magic on everyday tasks without realizing it, and now that he has nothing to do but be in the healthy open air and work on his various island improvement projects, he is much stronger. Because our occasional lovemaking doesn't seem to be affecting him as much as it used to.

But then, without a wand, he wouldn't notice, would he?

A diet of only fruit is neither healthy nor satisfying, so for our first several months on the island we spend most of our attention to providing variation to our diet.

Harry is the handy one, of course, so he designs the traps, though he is forced to ask for help when it comes to strengthening the vines and other components so they don't disintegrate in the water so readily. He hates that he has to rely on me for sharpening the rubbish the ministry gave us as knives and quickly learns how to keep coals smoldering for long periods of time so he doesn't have to ask me for cooking fire when the reeds and things he uses for fuel are too wet to light easily with the flint. Anything having to do with his island he will accept no assistance for.

Our nutrition is a common problem and there are some items that only grow on one of our islands—a certain delicious green berry that grows on my side being one of them. Fishing, likewise, falls into the common-interest category. Who's to say which of us a certain lobster or large fish belongs to?

The ministry only provided us with one set of cookware, so the large cauldron, the frying pan and the saucepan have to be shared between us unless we decide to cook together—something that Harry's prickly humor does not always permit. Luckily we have two teakettles so I don't have to face him first thing in the morning for the local herb that makes a decent substitute for tea. We are fortunate in that we have glass, thanks to Dumbledore's long-ago gift of a book in magical glassmaking and the abundant sand. Airtight stoppers for my phials are still elusive, however, and in the unfailingly damp and salty air many of my potions go off.

The intoxicant doesn't grow on my side, but I don't miss it. There are a hundred things I could concoct with my growing knowledge of the wildlife around me, but life is too busy to warrant distraction.

I work and I work. The berries and insects, the worms and the birds each demand investigation of their magical properties as well as any practical use in potions and foodstuffs. A fish or a crustacean a day is good enough for me, roasted on a spit that I turn with one hand while turning my makeshift magical test device I call an alembic with the other.

No matter how hard I try to lose myself in my work, which has always gotten me through dark times in the past, some things are very difficult for me to adjust to.

The weather, for one. I try to set up a simple record system for keeping track of my only knowledge of the macrocosm, the weather, but it's too depressing to think systematically about the climate on top of the nagging awareness of it that seems to be warping the marrow of my bones after only a few days. The weather and the landscape are anything but European, and though I've traveled widely I don't like the never-ending cheerfulness of the sun. And the rain is a bright sort of rain that promises to be over soon. A sunscreen was easy to manufacture, though it washes off in the water too quickly, but it's the feeling of the sun beating down on me, always there, watching….

This is the beginning of the cabin fever I expected in prison. I didn't expect to develop a horror of the sun, however.

So I hide in my network of hospitable caves. With my experimental compounds. And a flask of water.

Harry finds me some unknown period of time later. "Severus?"

"Yes."

"I haven't seen you check your traps for a few days. They were full."

"Lovely."

"What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" My hand is turning the alembic over and over. It's a beautiful show of random colors that only I can see.

"Are you going mad?"

"Possibly."

"Come with me. You can't hole up in here like a mole."

"No! I won't go out there!" The fierceness of my refusal takes him aback.

"Why not?"

"It's so bloody cheerful all the time!"

He laughs. "Would you prefer Azkaban, then?"

"Actually maybe I would. At least there one can work up a proper melancholy. All this sun while living out a sentence. It's unseemly."

Harry drags me to my feet. "You didn't convince me of this scheme of yours so you can abandon me here. You're going to eat regularly and quit hiding in the dark and pull yourself together to do this thing properly, is that understood?"

I allow myself to be pushed, blinking, into the remains of another splendid tropical day. Fish mashed with the starchy root from Harry's island is waiting for me. I eat.

Harry watches with his arms crossed. "Drink some water. You're probably dehydrated."

I drink.

"If I'd known how weak you were, I would never have fallen for you in the first place and this never would have happened."

"Madness runs in my family," I say mildly, but my attitude seems to further infuriate Harry.

"Is that so? So did other people in your family sell their souls to an evil magician and have all manner of disgusting orgies and kill people and pursue 17-year-old boys and use their incredible gifts for the wrong purpose and push someone to the edge?"

My mind takes a moment to scour my family history as revealed by Aunt Adele before answering. "You know, I don't know that anyone has managed to cram so much depravity into one lifetime, but taken as a whole, yes, I think it's safe to say my illustrious ancestry has done all these things."

"I may not have a wand," Harry's voice comes quiet and dangerous, "but I swear on my life, Severus Snape, I will strangle you in your sleep, I will push you off one of your cliffs, I will kill you dead if you try to leave me, mentally or otherwise."

The race to see who will kill Severus Snape first is hardly a race, because I could kill myself in any number of ways before he figured it out, but we stare at each other as if a gauntlet has been thrown anyway.

"Do you want them to win?" He asks. The "they" needs no explanation. This reaches me in a deep, hunted place that he knows we share.

"No, no actually I don't." I stand up on my own two feet.

Together we go for a swim, but like everything else we do from now on, it's not just that. We're rehearsing a lesson that we must not forget: being able to take pleasure in something is a form of mastery over one's situation that is not optional. When you stop being able to do so, everything switches gears and becomes oppressive.

A few days later I get my wish. The weather turns anything but cheerful. Harry was actually swimming towards my island just as I was setting out for the demilitarized zone that is a sandy inlet where I'm allowed to shout for him.

"Do you reckon this is a hurricane or something?" He asks me in the middle as we paddle toward my beach.

"I don't know. The sky is an awful green, but I didn't sense anything up until a moment ago."

We stand up in the sand and survey the clouds scudding low over the horizon. The wind starts to whip against our faces and the coconut palms bend. The birds fall silent.

"Didn't you sense this coming? Can't you feel the weather from miles away? Do they have tornadoes in whatever part of the world this is?"

"I don't know, I don't know," my mouth is saying automatically, but my toes feel warm and my nose feels cold. "Harry?" My hands are shaking his shoulders to make him stop staring at the strange color of the sea. "Do as I do, and whatever you do, don't look at the water."

"Hello! Welcome, illustrious guest!" I shoot him a desperate look that makes him imitate me.

"You there, hello!"

My toes get a tiny bit cooler. "So kind of you to visit our humble abodes."

"It's a real pleasure." Harry is shooting me looks to evaluate my sanity.

"No one has been on these islands in over a hundred years."

"Did you hear that?" The voice registered like its owner was standing right in front of me.

"I heard something, but I couldn't understand it." Harry's wand-hand is clenched. "What is this thing? I thought you said the shield kept anything magical from passing through it."

"They don't usually banish the finest of civilization. Can we assume you're the worst, then? It's nice to know who we have as neighbors."

"A siren," I mouth to my companion.

"What does it want?"

I haven't the slightest idea of how to speak to these creatures. My grandmother never taught me that, but she did impress that it's important to keep talking.

"We would be putting on airs to say that we are the worst, but let us just say we are far from the best."

A nudge from me gets the following from Harry, "Whatever we are, we don't want anything to do with whatever you are."

"Don't be impertinent," I whisper.

Fair to middling scoundrels, eh? I'll leave you to your mediocre penance then, except…"

"Except what?" The thing seems to understand me after all, I mouth to Harry.

"You can understand Severus? Bully for you, clue in the rest of us," Harry snorts.

"Pardon the intrusion. I was under a mistaken impression," come the words swirling in my head.

And my nose and toes get warmer and cooler, respectively, until everything is normal again. The sky turns back into its insipid blue, and the threat of storm recedes.

"What did it want?" Harry asks as the birds start chirping again with the threat gone.

"I have no idea, it says it was under a mistaken impression," I reply, deeply shaken for some reason I can't place.

"I miss Tristan," Harry says suddenly over the remains of a fish roasted on a spit.

That one name includes getting drunk in the Bastille district, flying brooms over the Seine, innovating the next stage in wizard art, and working on his sadly stillborn curriculum.

"He was a true friend to you, I know," and Dumbledore's loss hits me all over again. These reminiscences are inevitable when we get together, but they are also dangerous.

"I've tried to locate him on the dream-floo network, but it's hard to find it these days. Maybe they did something to hold us here when we're asleep, too. And I must be out of practice since you and I, well, since we moved around a lot in dreams.

He lights his pipe and inhales some forgetfulness to layer over the painful roots of his downfall.

"Sometimes I think I get a glimpse of Tristan's dreams but after everything, and him finding out I used to get inside him before, I feel bad. Maybe it's wishful thinking, anyway. I let him down as a friend."

"Everyone lets people down, Harry. Magical folk just have more ways they can go wrong,"

"Do you ever visit Shanti?" Thankfully she has been elevated from "that woman." "Can you find a muggle via dream-floo?"

"Yes, dreams are probably the place where muggle and magical folk are most similar. She has an 'address,' so to speak, like anyone else. Shanti is one of the few people I check to see are still out there, but I don't come any closer. She's had to bear enough."

"I just wish I could face Tristan once and tell him how I felt. Couldn't you transfigure into him?

Unnerved, I shake my head. "You know I can't do it properly without a reflection."

"Let me see."

After several minutes of intense concentration I still end up with a face that feels right but is apparently sort of blurry. "That's horrible! It's like his face is melting off!"

Hastily, I turn back into my true form. "That's what the birds said when I tried to transfigure into you."

"Into me? Why would you want to do that?"

"So I could take your place in prison if they sent you there." To avoid the shocked look on his face I continue, "One would think I know your face well enough to replicate it, but they kept saying I didn't make it look right, like there was an unreal glow to your face or I wasn't capturing feature flaws that I honestly can't see."

He scowls and then looks touched. "Good thing; that would be too weird in bed."

I choke.

"All of that is done for us Harry. I simply don't have it in me to ever have transfigured sex ever again."

He looks disappointed. "I was going to ask Julian over to my place," he says.

This wounds me, that he wouldn't allow me to set foot on his island but he would invite this other body.

"Perhaps you don't remember the Severus Snape who could hold a grudge, year in and year out, and stubbornly nurse a vengeance until it was ready to come to fruition, but mark my words, Mr. Potter, that I will not change my mind on this subject."


	63. Chapter 63

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 63: A Purpose

Harry flounces back to his island and doesn't return for two weeks. I work and only eat when the birds nip at me with their beaks. The traps that are set out in my little cove fill up faster than I can use them, so I salt and dry some of the meat for use in stews. Harry has a large-scale desalination project he's working on, but so far any scheme relies on heat, which must be provided by me—or glass lenses to focus sunlight that we can't seem to cooperate long enough to experiment with. Every so often I sit in front of the contraption he's built on my beach and spend a couple of hours making salt and water out of seawater. In return, Harry helps comb my hair.

For the first time in my life, I'm beginning to learn how to go long periods without thinking of much of anything. The days and sometimes weeks between our visits are, if anything, easier than the companionship.

Once during this two-week snit I think I hear curses floating at me on the wind, but it's hard to tell because I'm rotating my makeshift three-dimensional representation of Harry's magical signature as I've been monitoring it since we were banished. Made out of wood and some shark leather bonded with vine—our now favored method of making rope—this contraption is a smaller version of the large alembic that has been my escape from thinking about my fate. It can thus simulate the animated three-dimensional turning that was once accomplished with all those computer programs my research assistants used.

They would be amazed that it is possible to examine our magical patterns using a bit of tree and a bit of shark and a lot of magic, but for my purposes this is actually much better. I never did learn how to use that software, and it was only a representation. My alembic actually has the magical signatures of each test substance, so I can feel whether they are approximately balanced, any reactions that the items in neighboring slots have, and what the overall magical signature is for the entire conglomeration.

Really, the word alembic is a misnomer. I chose this potionmaking term because it's a distillation or transmutation that I'm after in my work. In form it's similar to an old-fashioned astrolabe or armillary sphere.

Getting the items in the different slots to move, each in its own orbit, wasn't that difficult, though I've so far been unable to assemble a complete signature for any substance, which would be like first finding all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle where they are floating in their own orbits and then fitting them all together. The challenge is separating all the so-called macrocosmic forces—the weather and other environmental factors are all I have really considered tracking. But as the Vietnamese sage said, these worlds upon worlds also include the nature spirits and possible astrological influences all the way on up to the arcane level of the variously termed bodhisattvas and angels, concepts I have never felt myself remotely prepared to address.

The outer layer of the alembic is meant to represent this elusive macrocosm, called by Paracelsus the macrocosm, the Upper Sphere, the sidereal body, the Limus Coelorum, and a host of other terms, which may be distinct or coterminous for all I know. Basically I take everything I don't understand or that exists at the edge of my senses and throw it onto the outer set of rings, which rotate just like the inner layer, though each "sphere" made up of spinning hoops itself spins on its own axis.

The result is a display of magical-mechanical ingenuity that probably uses up my lifetime's meager store in that area. Because while it makes sense that the proximity between a Hot Active Green and a Cool Passive Blue would change them slightly over time (the substrate separating my old collection of signatures was designed with this eventuality in mind) I am helpless to understand exactly what that reaction is or what it might mean.

The trouble is that there are so many gray areas where the two worlds get mixed up. It's the equivalent of a person mistaking a chance element of their environment for who he or she truly is. My model incorporates this basic human confusion as well. I sit turning and turning the alembic, tilting my wrist in such a way that the different levels are moved along a series of hinges and grooves that make the mechanism slow down or speed up, or force one part of the top level closer to a particular substance in the bottom layer.

The colored fireflies of various natural substances fly around, each in its assigned orbit, sparking very subtly as they move near another substance. The multicolored blurs transmit sensations that are beautiful and senseless, yet laden with hidden meaning to my Alkahest's antennae.

Expensive muggle mock-ups are nothing like the real thing. But where I do feel the loss of our magical-muggle partnership is the handling of data. There is no way one person's mind can hold all of the details of hundreds or thousands of test scenarios, much less discover the patterns in the relative strengths or weaknesses of these arrays.

And without paper to note my arrays, my one human mind can't benefit from the simplest kind of records. There's only a symbol system I'm devising, which is scored onto a soft branch. That's all that's left along with instinct, which, as has been proven, is often capable of deceiving me.

If muggle science were to be able to discern the presence, first, and then the activities of magic, that discovery is years off, it seems. But only a few magical minds—James and also, I suspect, Harry—have both the ability to think scientifically and the strength and discipline to do complex spells. If Harry's group had not been interrupted by his crimes, perhaps they would have been able to find the information science for managing the data generated by my experiments. It would have actually been a beautiful way for us to work together as equals.

But no more. My Harry is condemned to live as a muggle.

Finally I hear the splash of oars from the log canoe Harry has made. One small part of my mind wonders if he's begun to let go of the bad habit of thinking he can wear me down or guilt me into going along with his wishes. But the rest of me has a scientific interest in what his magical imprint is going to be like for today's entry on my branch.

Every inch of his body that he can see and reach with his right hand is covered with black designs. The places he can't see have clumsy swirls on them, no doubt accomplished with the help of the clear pond he tells me is on his land. The pipe is clenched in his teeth and he has the lazy gait that betrays he's stoned.

This man looks everything like a pirate and nothing like the person I fell in love with.

"What have you been doing?" he asks, filling the pipe with some of the herb before it goes out.

"Oh, you know, trying to redeem my soul," I say, shaking my head at the pipe. "You?"

"Trying to distract myself from not having any magic to do anything with," he says, smiling lazily with his mouth but not his eyes. "You're just so goddamn busy and self-important here, I can't stand to look at you." He drops a few leaf packets of food in my lap. "If you're not out there for our morning swim tomorrow I'll make you pay." He leaves.

We meet for a swim every morning for a week, me and this sailor. Once forced to leave my work I enjoy being in the water, and the tattooed man watches me enjoying it, and then I know for sure it is Harry in there. On the seventh day I depart on good terms with him, planning on making some salt so we can preserve our bountiful catch from the traps.

I must have gone back to my cave.

The next thing I know I'm staring at myself from 10 feet away while Harry forces water down my throat. Birds are hopping around, no doubt expressing concern, but I can't understand them any more than I can make sense of what Harry's yelling while he's alternately slapping me and crying.

Then suddenly I make out what the birds are saying:

"Nesting sickness."

"Most definitely nesting sickness."

Harry's face alternates between the hardened and vulnerable versions of itself.

Where I am there is pain, but it's refreshingly different than the kind offered by real life. But even from 10 feet away I can't stand to see the two parts of him warring like this.

Different aches suddenly appear on my nervous system. The birds must have been pecking at me.

And I'm back in prison.

I open my eyes to the shape of it.

"Severus! You came back!" He sobs and caresses my cheek with a black-resined hand.

A veil slides over his face.

"If your bird friends hadn't half pecked me to death I wouldn't have known to come over and throw your corpse in the sea."

"Yes, they appear to have been pecking me too," I rasp through a dry throat while rubbing my head. My hand feels too heavy for my wrist.

"They wouldn't let me have any peace so I came over to see what kind of a fix you'd gotten yourself into. Nice to have an escape."

"The antechambers of hell are a vacation spot for some of us," I reply mildly. "At least it's not so bloody cheerful." The sun hurts my eyes more than ever.

"Well, while you've been out and about, I've been keeping your dehydrated hide alive. You can thank me later. Here," he shoves a packet of mashed root. "You've only had a little fruit juice for days, so take it easy on the solids." He catches himself. "Or don't. I don't care."

The root has a little coconut milk and a cinnamon-like bark we favor mixed in it and is almost unbearably rich after my long fast. A few mouthfuls feel like a banquet.

"Whoever thought you would be such a good cook," I smile, chasing a warm feeling I sense just on the other side of Harry's desiccated shell.

"Whoever thought you'd not be able to feed yourself. Glad I can be your house elf."

I don't have the energy to remind him I can't abide the things.

"While you were stepping out, I was busy too."

"Another agricultural project?" I take a sip of warm tea. It tastes off but sends a nice comforting feeling down my gullet.

"You might say that." Something about his tone alerts me. "I was sowing, and we can wait and see what I shall reap."

My consciousness has just been yanked all the way back into my skull. It's not a pleasant process. "Can you just tell me what you've gotten into or do I have to guess?"

He smiles. My heart sinks for a reason I can't explain. "While you were in parts unknown, I did a little fishing." I roll my eyes. We fish almost every day. "In your mind."

Forgetting I'm too weak I try to get to my feet. Falling on top of Harry is the last thing I want to do at this moment, but that's what happens. "Get me, off, of you," I flail helplessly and he's really throwing back his head in unnerving laughter now.

"A lot of charming images in there. After being away from your mind for so long, it struck me that there were so few changes to the overall cloying combination of lechery and hope. A certain muggle lady figures prominently, but there are also other individuals who surfaced after a little digging—my father, my mother—"

My throat feels like it's closing up. "What did you see?" I choke out.

"It's not what I saw, although I saw plenty." His leer could be directed at any one of a number of memories. "It's what I did that you should be concerned about."

For a moment, we are back in Voldemort's parlor, listening to the evil man describe planting grains of falsehood into our minds to be pearled over as truth.

The words come out slowly from my mind that seems to be moving through mud—possibly the result of contamination with foreign suggestion. "You wouldn't stoop so low as to imitate the madman who was our ruin."

His raised eyebrow declares how far he's already gone down that road.

"What could you possibly want from me that you don't have already?"

A movement of his lip transmits all the fantasies a transfigured me would be a useful prop for.

"Get out! Get away from here. You are persona non grata on this island forevermore!"

I propel him into the sea and start a feverish series of activities that my body grudgingly gives in to.

First and foremost, my mental privacy must be protected. Thus, there is the substitute for Dreamless Sleep that must be concocted. It's a complicated compound using known ingredients, but here I have to start from scratch, re-creating the Spagyrics and the various chemical reactions from memory.

While I forage around the island, often on hands and knees when my strength gives out, I am formulating the most complex wards I've ever made. Charms, the forte of Harry and his father, are complicated because they change things, bringing something into being that didn't exist or changing the nature of something. Wards can be thought of as mazes or codes, and with me they have the added complexity of my awareness of magical signatures. So while the charms in the book I gave Harry for Christmas, which he mastered with little work, would take me weeks to figure out how to do if I ever learned them, my wards are some of the best you can find.

All this is to say that every day a certain purple-pink magic will find more new labyrinths and barriers keeping it from me.

It takes me three days and I'm dropping from exhaustion, but I finally end up with my first prototype of Dreamless Sleep.

The reveal is very similar, but the process of making it was very different than the original.

Suffice it to say that I am not at all confident that I'm not poisoning myself, but at least death is a form of rest where Harry can't rifle through the contents of my skull.

"Are you going to nest again?" chirps a small green bird to me anxiously.

"Perhaps. Don't peck me if I am immobile for a long period of time, please. You nearly punctured my skull, the lot of you."

Pulling the mat of rushes around me that Harry brought during my illness, I sleep.

When I wake up, I stretch, refreshed, and find emissaries from most of the local bird species nudging each other and staring at me.

"Well, what is it?" I say, much less irritably than before I slept.

"You've been asleep for two days," someone says.

"And it was exactly what I needed. Look." I get to my feet. "Right as rain."

The birds grumble their misgivings to each other and I go back to work.

Without regular supplements from Harry's better-provisioned island, I have to put some thought to expanding my own island's food provisions. This is where I wish I'd bothered to learn my grandmother's gift with talking to sea creatures. She only had to wheedle the sirens for help and they'd launch huge fish, delicacies from the deep sea, right to our feet.

After our near-miss with the sirens, I don't want to appeal to them directly, but there must be some way to use my special affinities to coax sea denizens from the other side of the magical barrier to jump into my cauldron for dinner.

Taking care to swim where Harry is unlikely to see me, I spend a lot of time in the water, trying to discern the different presences that lurk in the deep. Sending out a magical charge with me in the water is a bad idea: whatever sea life was in the vicinity was drawn to me like a magnet, and it took some doing to get the jellyfish and sea urchins and other unwanted sea animals away from me.

I did end up with a large yellow fish that I was unfamiliar with, but which registered as very edible when I scanned it. Perhaps it's just as well that I can't speak the language of the ocean. The fish's great eye lolling at me was enough to make me reconsider eating it, but without fish Harry and I would starve.

If he eats birds over there on his island, I've instructed to keep me out of the whole business.

Fowl or no fowl, Harry's the one with the cushy island. It's me I'm worried about.

Instead of killing the fish immediately, I took some time to memorize its natural qualities. Stunning the fish in the shallows, I sent out a magical current keyed to its signature.

There was enough fish to dry and salt for a rainy day.

Over time I discovered that crustaceans are best left to the traps, because there are simply too many of them to answer my "call" that I'll have my island overrun by crabs if I'm not careful.

The fish with their larger brains are more complex, so I don't tend to overfish our waters so readily with them.

Over a month passes. I've nearly perfected the "fishing by signature" technique, have discovered new edible fruits at the very tops of trees I had overlooked, have run my little desalination machine to create the salt necessary for preserving extra food, and have learned how to use my magic to dry fruits.

"You're looking well," says a little red bird one day while I'm brewing my Dreamless Sleep that may be better on the system than the original.

"If you can call it that," I grouse. "I've scarcely had a moment to think while trying to protect myself against the menace from that scoundrel."

I stare at the bird for so long it preens itself for an excuse to look away.

With angry strokes I swim over to the island I've never been welcome on. "Come out, you miscreant!" I bellow from the water, using my magic to magnify the sound.

Oh, he hears it. His magic gave a little quiver of delight but he's taking his time coming to the shore.

"Good evening," Harry says with the waves licking his toes.

It's always been difficult to stay angry at him face to face, and he watches his presence have the usual disarming effect.

I pull the scraps of my tantrum around me. "Blast you to hell, you wretch. You manipulated me!"

"What have you been up to this past month? I haven't heard from you," he inquires with a grin.

"I've been preparing for the invasion of Voldemort the Second," I say with a furious blush. "As you counted on with all your little suggestions of dream warfare."

"Come now, Severus, do you really think I want any more than my share of twisted thoughts? I don't want to get in your head any more than you want to get in mine." The bitter truth of that last statement gets no comment from me. "It's been a productive month, yes?"

"On everything but my research, yes. There's a lovely yellow fish I've discovered. Would you care to have dinner at my place?"

"I'd be delighted."

I wait in the water while Harry gathers a few contributions and then together we swim while keeping a sort of tray aloft and out of the worst of the salt water.

"Am I so easy to manipulate?" I ask shamefacedly over roast fish.

"Only because I know how to push your buttons. You yourself never stop complaining about how suspicious wizards are. But as a wise man once told me, 'the magic has to go somewhere.' You were moldering away in that cave of yours and you needed a purpose." He smiles around his pipe. "An enemy."

Having been Harry's surrogate enemy often enough, I suppose turnabout is fair play. My silence speaks for me.

"Impressive wandless hex." My thoughtless comment needles him in the wrong place.

"They can take away my wand, but they can't take away the wizard in me!" he exclaims and stomps off.

The next time Harry comes to bring me a lobster to cook and to replenish his salt supply, he's not alone.

"What is that?" I ask of the creature clinging to the faded shirt he still sometimes wears when coming to my island, as if that counts as "dressing up" and will negate the effect of the black designs swirling on his chest.

"Severus, meet Bruno," Harry says proudly, scooping up the tatty little creature in his hands. "Bruno, meet Severus." We exchange an equally unimpressed look while Harry coos over it. "We've been hanging out ever since we tried to have the same fruit for lunch." He extends his hands. "I think he's some kind of marsupial. Do you want to hold him?"

Gingerly, I pick it up. My suspicions are confirmed after examining the sour-faced thing. "You call that a marsupial? That's not a proper pouch! It's just a flap of skin." And then, using the dialect that seems to be spoken by many of the mammals in the area, I tell the same thing to this "Bruno."

The thing twists and scrabbles at me from my hands. "Give it here. I should have known you wouldn't be able to have any feelings for anyone or anything that wasn't on your little magical spit over there" he gestures to my alembic. "Put your lobster on the fire and have a roast while it's still fresh," he says over his shoulder, with the rodent sniggering at me from the opposite shoulder.

On my branch keeping track of Harry's magic I mark the glyph for "equivocal." What else can I call the happenstance that the not-really-a-marsupial would have brought out a gentleness and happiness in Harry that not even the most tender lovemaking—when I'm allowed to offer it and it's not refused—has brought out since we've been here?

Granted, I have other reasons for not liking the tree-dwelling rat. It's like a cross between a house elf and a ferret: mugging and cooing to your face, smirking behind your back. The worst is its musk that seems to penetrate Harry's very skin, making me feel as though we're not alone when we're making love, which is the only time he removes the thing from its perch on his shoulder.

"You're the worst thing that ever happened to him," the rat says when Harry is drowsing one afternoon after a roll in my sand.

"By the smell of you I'd say you were among the worst things that ever happened to Harry," I say in the creature's language.

"At least he has someone to get him through the nights. Who crept near you while you slept last night? The crabs? The poisonous toads?"

"What do you mean, 'get him through the nights'?"

"He cries and makes a fuss every night, that's what. And he says your name sometimes."

"I'm not the only author of his book of sorrow," I say tiredly.

"Then why does he always come back from visiting you all tense and have to smoke more?"

"Everything is not as it seems. Just like that not-actually-a-pouch, rodent."

Harry has woken up at some point during this interchange and is deriving great enjoyment out of my tiff with his pet. He takes a puff from his ever-present pipe, slightly glassy-eyed already.

And he's laughing that closed laughter that doesn't allow me a way to join in. "It's a good thing you don't have a reflection, because you look barmy when you do that."

I frown.

He flops an arm over me and kisses me with the lips that are still an entryway into his true self. "How do you talk to Bruno? Teach me."

Using my lips to shape his as I once did with French, I teach him how to say insulting things in the rodent's language.

"Hey Bruno, 'You're nothing but a rat, you pompous bastard,'" Harry says with a fair bit of accuracy while stroking his pet.

With the blowup the creature was expecting nowhere in sight, it slinks off to pout.

Then it rains, one of these sudden squalls that I can't always predict with my haunting awareness of the weather, and we retire into one of my many cozy caves to spend the night making a stew and, still more enjoyably, making plans.

Whether his agricultural activities, fishing and food preparation are enough to occupy my sometime-companion on the days I don't see him is anyone's guess. The rat won't tell me a thing, and the birds haven't described anything worrisome on the intelligence missions I regularly send them on.

Harry's mind is always full of innovations for this island of his I have yet to see. He has an idea for creating a separate climate for plants from colder zones like our home. A "reverse greenhouse," he calls it. He's brilliant, this man who scratches in the ashes by the fire pit to illustrate the spells he would have me intone in his stead. A ball of light floating in the corner helps soften the effect of the plant resin on his skin.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asks in a pause to drink his herbal tea.

"Can't I admire you?"

His mouth twists into an ugly sneer. "Why not take it all, since I can't use it?" he snarls, unfastening his tattered cutoff shorts.

I turn into a bird and fly a few circles around my island until he gives up and returns to his own.


	64. Chapter 64

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 64: Civilizations

One night I have a dream.

Harry and I have spent more time than most humans in a conscious dreaming state, and even for one such as us, this dream stands out.

Albus is standing before me. Albus lets me in.

He stands before me, dazzling with nothing separating us, and he very deliberately opens a door that he has always kept bolted between us.

The room he lets me into is a sort of garden: full of bright colors and wondrous beasts I've never seen before. And lots of sweetmeats.

"Welcome, old friend," Dumbledore says.

The garden suddenly reveals itself to be just one small part of a civilization designed by a genius. The angles of the vastly complicated buildings are both futuristic and ancient, like a gothic cathedral designed by a scientist.

"Is this your magic?" I breathe, awed by the art behind it, and by the privilege of finally being let into it. Dumbledore is truly the peer of Merlin.

He makes a gesture like that of a hereditary prince born into the lap of a luxury he knows only too well was just an accident.

"Come, sit by the fountain," my friend leads me to a many-spouted contraption that would have been the envy of my grandmother. A bird is drinking, and to calm myself from this rich surge of emotion I'm experiencing, I greet it in the bird language.

Dumbledore imitates the sound I just made. "You speak the Ancient Tongue?" the bird and I ask simultaneously.

"It never occurred to me before, but I think you just revealed the secret to me," Albus says in a perfect rendition of the bird language.

The animals in the garden gather round and we have a very amusing tea with antelopes and boar, frogs and birds. We tell stories and laugh and explore all the delights of this world that seems to be of him but not the same as him. As equals we weigh and we theorize, we conjure and we decoct. An infinity passes very pleasurably.

I catch the old man—who is not old at all in this form, but right in his prime, though with a white beard—staring at me.

"What is it?" There's something unnerving about the look that I can't place.

"Is this what it's like with Harry?"

Talking about Harry is odd in this strangely asexual place, but I reply politely, "Sometimes, when we're lucky. These days, he often can scarcely stand to look at me from 20 yards."

Albus is studying me with the full power of his magician's gaze. It doesn't bother me, this Look that is not yet That Look. Finally I can bear this pure blue gaze. And finally, some barrier that has existed between us for years, perhaps always, is falling away. I'm suddenly reminded of James, so long ago, under the Invisibility Cloak.

Dumbledore reaches his hand toward my cheek and I flinch back.

He gets angry. It's a new side to a new face.

"What harm can you possibly do to me now? And do you think I'm such an old fuddy duddy I can't make up my own mind? Your problem, Severus, is that you think you're the only one with free will."

The touch that I longed for as a small, confused boy, the simple pat on the shoulder from this father figure, is washing over me, too late, too late.

The apology in Dumbledore's face reflects this awareness, and I hasten to soften it.

"You could have never risked this—all this." I gesture to the fantastic, delicate city of his magic. This conversation is taking an odd turn and I try to make light of it. "Something unspeakable would have happened and we would have ended up the two of us banished to an island."

Albus laughs with a new edge. "If there's anyone I'd like to be exiled on an island with it would be Severus Snape."

My cheeks burn hot and I'm afraid that this one dream-touch to my face has revealed my True Face to the ruin of my old friend.

"Imagine all that time to experiment. We'd revolutionize magic!" And the animals all laugh at my relief.

After we've had our tea, Dumbledore sits quietly in his chair while his magnificent buildings begin to warp and shatter around us.

"What's happening?" I ask in panic, while a particularly large castle bends to the breaking point.

With a motion of his wand, the chaos stops.

"I wanted you to see why I was so careful around you. That I had no choice but to keep you at arm's length." His face is resigned, old, close to the one I said goodbye to before our exile.

"You mean, just being around me did—all that—to your magic?" I ask in horror.

"An unfortunate interaction that could only be held at bay with some powerful wards, dear friend," he says sadly, rising from his chair.

I rise as well, still trying to come to terms with one of the most vivid depictions of my mutated system's effect on a magical being I've ever experienced.

So I don't think about being drawn into Albus' embrace until it is too late.

"Are you mad?" I struggle against his arms but he is infinitely stronger than I.

"Actually, I'm dying, but they might not be dissimilar," he says with his usual carefree air. His eyes are drinking in something about my form, and his hand touches my forehead with a hand that feels like pure light. "I wanted to speak to this True Face of yours before I left, to make sure the message got through—you've been one of the brightest points in my city of light."

And his face becomes like a constellation, his arms hold me like the arc of the skies, and I am being shaken awake by Harry.

"Severus, Severus," Harry's crying. "I went to say goodnight to Dumbledore by dream floo and he wasn't there."

"Yes, I think he's gone," and my voice has some of that placidity I always found so infuriating in my old friend.

"No, he's here," Harry insists, pulling me to my feet.

When I step outside of my cave, I rub my eyes once, twice, but the vision doesn't clear.

There is a fine network like crystals covering over my island and Harry's. It's like the stars have decided to come build an outpost of their civilization made of logic and light. My sometime-partner and I stand where all our travails landed us on the edge of the earth, the waves licking our ankles and the crystalline structures lighting on our shoulders.

The purity of Albus' magic is even more beautiful now that it is divorced from his body and projected into our little prison.

This familiar yet alien geometry winds around Harry and me, pulling us closer together than it would have ever been comfortable to witness while it was tied to Dumbledore the wizard.

The two of us, the three of us, stand there embracing in our warm tropical cell and know with one mind that the headmaster has at last forgiven us for falling in love.

As dawn approaches the shining structures begin to blow off in the breeze, and Harry and I stand very small in the surf as two children abandoned by one of the only parental figures they ever knew.

A short time later we get an unusual package enclosed in our shipment.

"It must be Christmas!" Harry exclaims with something like his old enthusiasm.

"No, Harry," I point out the inscription on the wrapping with a shaking finger.

In what is unmistakably Albus' hand, it reads: "To Harry and Severus."

"Surprised they sorted out his will and got his bequest through all the legal channels so quickly," I observe.

"It better not be some boring old book," Harry jokes to distract from his emotion.

He unwraps the package and reveals—another Foucault book. "No! How could he!" Harry is outraged that this is what our dear friend thought to leave us.

"Give it here," I snatch the volume from his hands. "This is no ordinary book."

It leaps from my hands back into Harry's.

In Harry's hands, the book begins to quiver. Before our eyes, the paper turns into wood, then elongates into a wand.

The wand is just right for Harry's magic. It recognizes him. Dumbledore used a variant of Fragmentus!

Harry weighs it in his hand experimentally. The blast of the unmastered magic almost knocks me flat.

"Sorry, Severus, I guess I'm out of practice," Harry says with elation. He points at the sea to call one of the traps I usually haul in for us. The trap shoots into the air and falls back in the water. "Do you think there's something wrong with this wand because it was transfigured?"

"Er, no, Harry, let me experiment a little to get you in sync with it."

And a shamefaced Harry has to endure several days of experimentation until I find the tropical equivalent of Cimarron Nonesuch salt to neutralize his whacking bad case of Reaper's Reward.

Once he's able to cast spells again, Harry goes on an improvement rampage. I can hear him felling trees and levitating tubing he's fused out of our local rubber equivalent, and the work goes on at all hours now that he can conjure his own light. When he charms his own "broom" from one of the shrubs I hear him whooping and hollering with joy and I think of all that magic that has been stagnating in him finally having an outlet.

"I'm surprised that Dumbledore left us both a wand that is designed for me," Harry says in between projects.

Crafty to the last, Albus must have known what things were like for me, living with a permanently frustrated cellmate.

Things are better for us when we are concentrating on a project together.

One of Harry's simplest construction projects means more to me than the berries and plants with edible roots that are growing in his irrigated field. After spending over two years in a near-constant state of transfiguration, I was left feeling constantly dirty. That's what happens when your mind senses every touch as occurring on both your real and assumed skin. No matter how much you wash, your real skin feels cooped-up and clammy. Harry watched me scrub myself raw on many nights because of it.

When he noticed how often I retired to my island's delightful stream to have a soak and a good think, Harry built an overhang for me so I can bathe in the stream without getting burned by the sun. I refuse to use the resin that he relies on as a sunscreen, and the potion I've been working on for that purpose only lasts a moment in the water.

And thus I sink my toes into the small pebbles at the bottom of this miraculous source of fresh water in the middle of the ocean, and I imagine years of accumulated tensions melting away.

One day Harry lands on my beach with one hand dripping blood.

"What did you do?" I ask, holding his hand above his head while I fly us over to my cave where I keep the potions.

"That swordfish nose I had was great for cutting vines but this new one I caught is much sharper than the other. I slipped."

In a moment the saucepan has heated a bit of the disinfectant potion I've learned to make with several substances on my island along with a type of fungus that only grows on Harry's but I recognized as a Warm, Passive from his description. Using the pelican I blew myself, I mist some of the potion on the nasty cut and then, satisfied that most of the microorganisms have been banished, I murmur one of Lessmore's disinfectant spells and take the glass spoon I use for stirring potions to smear a bit of the warm paste on Harry's wound.

After a few minutes it's already less raw and jagged looking, and Harry gives me a rare compliment.

"I couldn't survive without you here, Sev." The even rarer nickname makes my throat catch. "Really, I couldn't. This cut could be the end of me without treatment. All the things that come up. They never send enough toothpaste in the ministry shipment. You've repaired my glasses dozens of times. That one time I ate the fish that made me sick. Or the time you got stung by that insect. Where would we have been without your magic before I got my wand back?"

We both shudder. One evening after a shared dinner my airway almost closed up from the swelling caused by the small, painless bite from one of the countless insect species we share our islands with. Poor Harry had to watch my face swelling up like a balloon while I smeared a paste on myself with one hand and cast the sterilizing charm on a stick with the other in case I needed to perform an emergency tracheotomy. When the salve worked we were both crying. He keeps a container of the antidote I happened to have on hand by his bed—this much the loathsome "Bruno" has confirmed.

"Some of it is magic, yes, but most of it is knowing our environment."

"Which you are amazingly gifted at, Severus. You're so good at being here. Like you were made to survive and discover in a strange environment."

There is something about his words that really reaches me through what is usually a quiet, distant truce these days. No one has ever said I was good anywhere. Most places I've only survived by heavy-duty spells hiding and separating me from others.

My arms are around him and I'm weeping into the black swirls on his neck.

With nothing else to do, we have begun to allow each other a certain amount of leeway with emotions, so Harry strokes my hair and lets me cry. After taking care of him so much over much of our relationship, it's rare for me to just let go like this. And even rarer these days for Harry not to push me away somehow.

He touches puts a hand to my face and the other reaches for yet another of my magical innovations—the condom made of locally available materials which expands our sexual repertoire beyond the activities limited by the possibility of burns.

"You see, where would we be without your genius?" Harry asks, fitting the sheath of plant material over me.

The motions we make on that occasion have been made before, but it is nevertheless something new. We have never done this before.

We've been in exile for almost a year, but the rest of the world and the people in it have finally fallen away with a few gestures in concert.

Unlike so much of our relationship, we're not struggling to get away from people or prove them wrong or recover from what they've done to us. Our bond, which has always been strong, is suddenly stronger than all that.

Our skin speaks to its brother skin, saying how we wish that we had been able to do this earlier, but we're happy we ever learned it at all.

Everything changes for us after that.

Harry starts coming so often and we make love so much we have to start cutting back because he's getting ill.

When he can't stay the night he misses me. I know because he tells me so in my mind. For all intents and purposes we are married. The two halves of this whole begin whispering to each other at night as I thought we would never be able to do again. Perhaps this is what has been missing from our relationship—there is no lying in this space, no matter what Voldemort would claim.

We admit we talk to Dumbledore in the stars every night before bed so we start doing it together. We tell him we turned out all right. That he doesn't have to worry. And occasionally a ghost of the old man's presence will waft by us and we're sure he's gotten the message.

When I happen upon a root that would be a good mild intoxicant, we spend our subsequent evenings pounding the fibers together while we talk and sing. I teach him my potions songs that he never wanted to learn before and we make new songs up for the same reason as the others were made—to help us remember the healthful and harmful properties of the world around us.

My friend, though you might wheedle

I'll not have any three-horned beetle,

The one that is red has a nice taste

And shouldn't ever be put to waste.

There's a special way you sing when you know no one else can possibly overhear. It's an ancestrally sanctioned activity that has nothing to do with pleasing the ear, though Harry has finally reconciled himself to the fact that my voice is not bad at all. As with so many things we do for the first time in our banishment, we hit upon methods that must be similar to those that occurred to early humans.

Harry and I make up our own stories based upon what we think our friends are doing. As the rest of the world falls farther and farther away, the hurts we have suffered at others' hands smart less, and the only thing that really hurts is their absence. Thus, tales are spun about his Hogwarts friends and Tristan, the irascible Pascal and other denizens from Gregor's bar, Dumbledore, of course, Shanti, and even Freddie and Jim, our prison-guard friends who, good as their word, have slipped in a few notes and newspaper clippings into the rations we can increasingly do without.

Mostly Harry takes care of our orders, which are largely his engineering equipment such as pulleys and levers for the irrigation system. For me, he asks for paper, though they never send very much as if they're afraid I'll get a message out of our cell. And then there is the constant need for air- and water-tight containers for anything we don't want corroded by the elements in short order. Even the raw rubber I asked for at first to fashion my phial stoppers isn't necessary anymore, as we have hit upon a tree sap that is miraculously similar.

When we run out of things to say about people we know, we move on to the endless myths from the animal kingdom. I've heard hundreds of stories from the bird kingdom. One night I'm trying to remember a tale called "The Flowers of the Air," which is about a bird who carries a beautiful flower in his beak with the idea that he will bring it to his beloved. Along the way the pollen falls out of the flower and sows itself in the clouds.

At first everyone is awed by how beautiful the flowers look in the sky, but soon the flowers grow so numerous they start blocking out the sun. That's as much as I remember, so I call one of the bright-plumed tropical birds over to our campfire.

"Do you know the story, 'The Flowers of the Air?'" I ask the bird after a ritual greeting.

"Every chick knows that one," scoffs the bird with its long beak.

"We're up to the part where the flowers start blocking out the sun," I prompt, and the bird fluffs up her feathers and intones,

"And the bird should have realized that he had been very careless to snatch up a living thing from one place and presume to carry it to another. But instead, he made the same mistake again by bringing up a type of fly he thought would eat the flowers to nothing in short order. Then the flies grew too many and the clouds seemed like boiling masses of black in the sky. This made everybody ill-humored all the time, because no one wants to look up at black clouds like that day after day, rain or no rain. And it hadn't been raining because the clouds were too busy admiring their finery, when the flowers took root, and then slapping themselves silly when the flies came.

"By that time even clouds were ill-humored from slapping themselves, and then they went on strike entirely, hanging up there swollen and useless in the sky like so many lumps.

"Things were getting very desperate, and while humans, the foolish creatures that they are, began consulting soothsayers right and left for a solution to the drought, the bird was feeling quite desperate himself.

"Finally, he confided in his beloved and she rightfully took him to task. 'You blockhead! How could you be so stupid as to carry anything larger than a speck of dirt with you when you embark on a large journey through the air? Everyone knows this; it's the Second Law of the Bird Code: If you're traveling farther than you can in one sun, shake yourself off before you've begun. Don't you remember the story of the bird who sowed a vine into an alien environment and it took over half the world?'

"Her lover hid his head under his wing, and she took pity. 'But luckily the way of our species is—"

"'Fly together, fall together!' the troublesome bird finished her sentence. 'That's it! We need to assemble a convention!'

"And so the two birds called for a convention of all the birds all over the world. From the great auk to the tiny hummingbird, all the birds met in a secret location. Even the non-flying birds went to great pains to send representatives. When they were all assembled, the foolhardy bird took heart and spoke:

"'My friends, I have committed a wrong, and this is why the sky has refused to rain.'

"There were chirps of disapproval.

"'But with your help, the clouds will return to their function once more.' And after the bird explained his plan, they all agreed it was a good strategy.

"Together, the flying birds flew like a scythe, ripping through the air until they came into contact with the miserable clouds. The larger birds used their superior force to uproot the flowers from the clouds, which the smaller birds wound together into a tight package that wouldn't re-seed itself on the way down to earth.

"That done, all the birds, great and small, had a huge feast on the flies that were milling about aimlessly in the clouds.

"They didn't have time to loll about, because the clouds had suddenly realized how long it had been since they'd had a good rain.

"Meanwhile, the flightless birds down below had fulfilled their part of the plan by clucking and ushering all creatures on land indoors for what would prove to be a monumental flood. If you hear anyone say that the chickens (who are far more numerous than the Dodos and Kiwis and other land-birds) went around telling everyone the sky was falling, you tell them to stop spreading lies! What, in fact, they said was, 'Go to high ground to save yourselves from the rain that is soon to start falling.' People were grateful to them for having told them, because fat raindrops as big as your head started falling form the sky soon after.

"Everything was all right again, and the sentimental bird that nearly brought the world to an end with his gift of a flower gave his mate a serenade the next time he wished to proclaim his love. And that is the gift lovers exchange to this day."

The bird had been letting me translate bit by bit for Harry's benefit, but as often happens with her kind, she got caught up in her own story, with lots of dramatic flourishes, so that she only seemed aware that she'd been acting out the traditional tale for humans once she was done.

The long-beaked bird and Harry stared at each other, Harry fully grasping the extent of this other civilization for the first time, the bird staring back because she had just granted Harry this glimpse. Me, I was inducted as a third-degree initiate to the Solemn Flock of the Silver Feather years ago, so they think of me as some grotesquely large featherless land-bird, apparently.

"Thank you, Tika," I bow to the bird, and Harry bows with me. The poor creature attracted quite a few other birds with her performance, so she flies off to leave her embarrassment behind with a bracing flight over the ocean.

"That was bloody incredible," Harry says. He's been smoking less of his herb, so it's on the strength of the story alone that he gets up to splash some water from the cistern on his face. "It was exactly like your grandmother's fairy tales, except with no violence and a community-minded message instead."

And because Harry can always think of a better use of my talents than I would on my own, he suggests that we start inviting different animal species to our nighttime fires, asking them to talk slowly so he can write down what they say on the bark that is our new paper substitute.

Animals are less forthcoming than birds, but soon we have a regular rotation between birds and mammals, though it is difficult for me to communicate in all but the simplest ways with insects (else I would tell them to leave off eating us alive no matter what unguents we slather ourselves with).

These tête-à-têtes are perhaps the first of their kind on the earth. There have been people who have known the secret of animal speech before; I suspect my old instructor, Professor Isle the Elvin woman, was one. But a systematic attempt to exchange myths with other species? No one has probably had the leisure, first of all.

But our cross-species mythology collection is the perfect thing to occupy the long, dark evenings.

Then Harry gets the idea of my translating some human stories for the other creatures to listen to. Naturally, as magical people our tastes tend towards the macabre, and the birds and rodents and other creatures come away with their worst suspicions about human culture confirmed by versions of my grandmother's stories.


	65. Chapter 65

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 65: Betrayals

_Hence we see daily how busily Nature is occupied in bringing them to mortification and perfection._

_The Golden Tract: Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers_

Things are peaceful, and dare I say, happy for a long string of months. But as is the way of the world, I don't realize it until it is gone.

Harry decodes the wards separating our two islands relatively quickly once he can interact with the magic himself. I'd only unraveled it enough to send deliveries of things that are in short supply on each island—lumber to my island, and rubber-substitute from mine to his.

Harry is ecstatic when he's able to apparate using a bridge he's charmed between the closest points between our homes. "Simply brilliant," I congratulate him with a hug, and his magic thrums strong under his skin.

One morning shortly thereafter I am so relaxed bathing in the deepest part of my stream and dreaming up new magical combinations to try in my alembic that I don't notice the purple-pink appear nearby until it is too late.

"Severus?" His voice has an alarmed edge.

My long hair is spread out around me, and I transfigure quickly to hide what tiny bit of skin had been revealed. Hermés trismegeste! I'm not used to him apparating around our little world!

"I'm not a muggle. You can't fool me." His voice is hard, dangerous. So quickly my mind pushes its awareness of this other Harry to the side, until it surprises me like a sliver of night during the day. He's moving towards me with his wand at the ready and I don't recognize his face.

"Let. Me. See." He whips his wand towards me and rips apart the transfiguration I've been wearing for months—of the Severus I was when we arrived on the islands.

"Stand up," he commands, and my obedience is mostly some suicidal need to live out the horror, to rid myself of the black taste that has been building up in my mouth all this time, fearing that he would find out. But a little of it is the natural aversion I feel to this black rainbow magic of his that is shaking the cage that is my transfigured form.

He strides forward and yanks my hair back, revealing some of the changes that have been happening to my body.

"How long has this been going on?" he demands, furious, and then he looks ill. "Have you always looked like this and just not told me?"

"Since we've been on the island I find the environment slowly changing me for some reason." Quickly, I'm covering myself with the habitual transfiguration again and struggling to keep my voice the one he is used to. The voice is always the hardest thing about transfiguration, in my experience.

"You DID want to be your aunt!" He's shaking me now. Or maybe he's just shaking. My body is the one thing that he's had to cling to, and the brief time it was denied him had disastrous results. Hence my breaking my own rule about transfigured sex.

"No I don't want to be my aunt. I never did. Harry, please stop and understand that I am affected by my environment in unusual ways. This has always been the case." I'm moving back, loosening his hold on my hair. This is not the Harry I want to discuss this with. "They won't even send me a magical trident. I have none of my equipment and no books. How am I supposed to know what is happening, much less how to change it?

"You fucking bitch," He spits on the sand near the stream. "You're more of a cunt than I ever gave you credit for." Then his face collapses and he makes a feeble move to part my transfigured layer again to get a better look. "You mean, you don't still have, you have... instead…."

"I am apparently being allowed to enjoy the best of both worlds," I reply drily, watching this new betrayal I never wanted hack away at his fragile equilibrium. This new way that I am a monster has shaken me to the core as well. "If the situation were reversed I would love you the same," comes my appeal to his compassion.

"That's because you're—like that—you like—women!" He's crying big mannish tears now. "How could you, Severus—can I still call you that?" and I don't know if he means how could I betray him by not telling him about my slow metamorphosis or the how could I betray him with this bizarre new happenstance.

"I am still Severus, the one you know and hate. Feel free to express your disdain and disgust for yet another thing that is not my fault. This is why I didn't tell you Harry. I've been sick about this shift that is beyond my control and have had no one but the birds to talk to."

"The birds haven't been fucking you," he growls brutally. "Or maybe you're into that, too, and you just never bothered telling me."

"Harry, I have no illusions about your feelings for me. I am your only sexual outlet for miles, though I hear dolphins are sometimes amenable." He glares. "You come to me to scratch an itch, and often it is no more than that, or perhaps a need for companionship. I never come to your island; I never initiate so much as an evening of pounding redberry root. You've always been in control in our relationship and I fully expect you to be so as long as we both give in to the compulsion to have each other. If you determine that those days are over, so much the better. I have my work and my friends. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to get dressed."

A little shocked by my own harshness I stalk over to my clothes with an assurance I do not feel.

"So you're going to start ordering women's clothes from the supply shipment too, I bet!" he hollers and rushes off my island.

"That seems like it went badly," one of my bird friends who had been watching says.

"Just as badly as it looked," I answer, buttoning the shirt as well as I can. The pants fit fine but one or two buttons don't close anymore on most of the shirts, which I scarcely wore when my body was as it should be.

I've felt like my body was many things in my life: filthy, ugly, freakish, a tool in the hands of Voldemort, a rack for Harry's fetishes, but this is absolutely the worst. The one thing I could count on was that Harry wanted me. More often than I would like to admit, that's been the only thing keeping me going, certainly the only thing keeping us together. And now, I've found something he can't forgive. Something that magic can't erase from his mind.

I don't hear anything from Harry except the felling of trees for over a month. My bird friends keep a close eye on me but at this point easy isolation is better than listening to Harry give voice to all the disgust I feel for my new state, so I go through the motions of daily life.

An unfortunate feature of the bird language makes them want to record my changed shape in a new name for me. Their tongue is particularly suited to recording global changes because the bird register is so wide. They use shifts in tone, much like some Asian languages, but in this case a particular sound will be associated with an epoch. These are long time periods that are only agreed upon at the bird conventions that usually happen after big events such a widespread drought or war.

Within these epochs subtle changes within the suffixes of words can also carry meaning, often of place but sometimes of a sub-section of time. So the same words, spoken with the tone of a particular epoch and with the characteristic word-endings of a time or place, can convey a great deal of meaning in a short statement, perfect for news exchanged by two birds flying by one another.

Everything is time-based, for the birds, and thus a creature like me has already had several names. At first I was I was the Heavy Vulgarian (a rough translation of what they call people) either Whose Cry That Made the Land of Snow Tremble, or Whose Scream Blackened the Sky, depending on the region. This was in honor of my first acquaintance with birds en masse on the occasion when I tried to cut off my arm and the resulting unearthly racket attracted a huge gathering.

Once they got to know me, I became (affectionately, I think) the Big Lout Who Nevertheless Knows the Ancient Tongue.

When I start hearing them whispering about changing my name to something more fitting—whatever that means—it's the worst betrayal I can think of.

"What about the cock who became a hen?" one bird with gaudy red plumage and a long tail asks, louder than the others.

"I haven't yet left anything so pertinent behind, I'll have you know, and I'm quite content as the Big Lout, thank you," I snipe at the conglomeration of winged beasts, and because the pun doesn't translate they murmur at my testy tone and fly off.

At some point Harry uses his wand to alter the currents somehow, and a ship is lured into the small bay formed by his island's west side. They have a sort of party. I can hear the drunken revelry. No doubt he is sharing his own homegrown intoxicants as well.

Of course it hurts a little that my long-time partner would rather be with a bunch of ruffians than with me. But more than that I'm praying that however many of them he has, the same number go back to the boat as came off it.

And this must be what happens because no new crime gets us sent to Azkaban. Apparently the Ministry has maintained its long-standing disinterest in what happens to muggles short of their untimely demise.

After they've left Harry saunters over, bleary-eyed and satisfied, reeking of beer and a scent I finally identify as "men." "I was going to send over a couple of the straight guys but they didn't want what you have to offer," he slurs and then lurches away.

I don't know whether to consider it progress or not that Harry seems released from the sentence that limited his satisfaction to my body. Perhaps that is the one positive effect of my transformation.

I go back to my alembics. Science is the only constant for me now. These days there is always at least one bird on my shoulder. They worry about me. Sometimes they drop a fish in my lap and I cook it. More often I eat the fruit and berries close at hand or bring up one of my traps and have crustacean stew.

It's important to stay busy because I don't even know what I think about my new body. Nothing in my life is anything I've ever asked for, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I've never been very good at putting people in neat boxes, and gender is no exception—why shouldn't my soluble body have slowly seeped out of my assigned box? My wonderful Lilly was by some measure a hermaphrodite in our relationship, and maybe looking back that's why we were so suited to each other. Molded by Voldemort's fantasies I was a quasi-transvestite and Harry enjoyed every second of it. So how can I accommodate this new development?

If Harry had taken it all in stride, I would have been able to pack away my real body to some far corner of my mind, and continue on as before with the Severus body that I like so well now that it is gone. After all, I've spent years of my life transfigured into another form.

If there's one thing that isn't unfamiliar, it's resignation. So I continue on, prepared to never speak to Harry again.

But one night I am out on my rocky peak, talking to the stars, when I see my old lover knee-deep in the surf, furiously casting his wand towards the west, the most likely direction for a ship to come.

That sight is a tableau of the human condition, the male condition. It moves me.

The next night, Julian comes calling on Potter Island, as he calls it.

"I brought some prawns," I say, holding the dripping basket. My clothes are soaked because I didn't want to sneak up on him by apparating.

He throws the basket to the side and we are rolling around in the sand. Harry has needed this so much that when he comes with a jerk, tears are wrested from his eyes, which is right when we get our hands around each other's maleness.

Soon he is ready again and I think he has actually taken me apart with hands and mouth and every other part of him that probes.

Then he lays on his stomach and we thrash like fish left by the tide.

When we are recovered Harry takes me, Julian, by the hand and shows me everything he's done to improve the island. It's amazing, especially because much of it was accomplished before he got his wand back. This prisoner in paradise is actually living in semi-civilization. He has neat rows of plants growing in the fields irrigated by pulleys forcing stored rainwater through hollow reeds. He has a food-storage area using a cooling charm, and his clothes are suspended in a spelled hollow in the rock so that they don't fill up with the cloth-eating mites that are the ruin of my clothing in short order. His island is full of flowers I've never even seen, and I hope to be able to come back and categorize the animals, some of which are species entirely new to me.

When I've seen everything I move to go rather than chance his humor changing for the worse. "You're going?" Harry wails. "Don't go, Jullan, it's the worst at night."

This lover whom I can no longer claim as truly my own lays me down on a bed of woven rushes and blows out the lamp obviously left by the ship and fueled by fish fat. He falls asleep clinging to me, the man who is too nervous that his transfiguration might wear off to try and sleep.

It's just as well. I wouldn't have gotten any rest with the flailing next to me.

His back arches and I fear he's having a seizure, but then his body goes limp. The process repeats over and over. It seems impossible that he's not conscious, but his eyelids seal him in his hell.

Harry has the worst nightmares I've ever witnessed. I don't even want to know of what.

To think that I should have been giving him Dreamless Sleep all this time.

How a man could have survived with nightmares of this severity for more than a year—closer to two—seems physically impossible. Anyone can see that he's paying for every death, every night. Every time he closes his eyes to the world he must be experiencing the black pearl Harry taking his due from his organism.

No wonder he smokes that infernal weed!

The next morning I excuse myself quickly to start experimenting and find something to give him a little peace. Harry accepts the potion as he's learned to accept everything I give him. After only a few days he starts looking a little healthier. Before, his body was healthy but something was obviously off that I just attributed to our condition as exiles from our society. But now I see that it was as though he was out of focus.

With better-quality rest, his face is sharper. His eyes clearer. Like he's really looking at me. Harry looks at me very seldom now while I'm in my old-Severus form, which is the only one I show him while on my island.

On my occasional visits to his island as Julian, the rodent isn't heckling me quite so much because of the huge difference in Harry's nights.

Integration has always been the problem for Harry. He was pushing the darkness out of his daytime mind with the smoke and denial, and it was feasting on him at night. Now he has the difficult task of living with it in the day. There's a new tentativeness about him that makes me nervous.

"What are you working on?"

Harry never makes the mistake of apparating too close to my living area again. He appears on my shore and lets me register his magic as he walks up the embankment to where I bathe, work and cook. This time his presence doesn't give me a start but his question does.

He's never interested in my science. It intimidates him, angers him as a reminder of when I studied him so closely. He thinks it's ridiculous to try and do research, to change things after it's all gone to shit. He says so, more or less kindly, almost every day.

"Tell me about the colors."

Trying to swallow my mistrust I find insects and fruits that roughly correspond to the basic magical colors and then show how they move in the pivoting three-dimensional alembic.

"Try this," Harry says and begins charming new pockets into the device to correspond with more planes as cross-sections to the theoretical spheres I've accepted as the most likely explanation for the changes within limits that Harry suggested long ago. We play for hours, me discussing outside influences that might make something move from active to passive, him talking about velocity and centrifugal motion affecting the entire system.

To think that we had to go to the end of the world before we could use our magic together for some meaningful end.

Harry goes away that night, as he has every night since he stumbled upon my true form. This time, however, he opens his mind to me and we discover that we both have started observing the stars closely. We tell stories about these nighttime neighbors, stories mixed with the people we have loved who are closer to us now because they cannot disappoint us and we cannot hurt them. Most of all, they make us feel closer to Dumbledore.

The stars, Albus. They gossip and fight just like we do. They flame and they die. So far away from each other when seen from up close, so near, so beautiful, when seen from far away.

We name the constellations:

Lilly the fierce.

Tristan the pure.

Dumbledore the architect.

Hermione the wise.

Ron the wise fool.

"Wise fool?" Harry starts to object in our shared heads, but then I tell him the Parsifal myth, one of the many that Miss Bundle sent to me for my summer reading. That neither his magical nor his modern muggle education would have exposed him to this story shouldn't be surprising—neither puts a high value on a tall tale. But Harry falls in love with the story. He does know Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and then we have learned so much from our animal friends' myths.

Ever the systematizer, my friend starts going back through his jottings of the animal kingdom's tales, comparing them to all the ones I remember from my summer reading assigned by Lessmore and Bundle and the books Albus has sent my way over the years. He studies the myths for similarities, and I have to swallow my sorrow in the face of yet another talent this very young man will never be able to exercise in the world: cultural anthropologist slash literary critic.

Sadness aside, it is nice that Harry has his own sedentary project to work on late into the nights in which we are rarely alone because of the connection we keep open between our restless minds. During the day we use our combined intelligence to find better substitutes for paper along with more suitable ways to store it safe from the tropical moisture and insects.

I visit as Julian when invited, but nurture the hope that soon Harry will be able to stomach touching a neatly transfigured Severus again.

When we are in the privacy of our minds, with no bodies to hold us back, we get along perfectly. We look at the stars together and we are the first two cavemen who each looked at his neighbor suddenly and found him very, very good. Who found the world right in front of them, whole and mysterious, broken and close.

Using the magical bridge that stays intact between the islands most of the time now, unless he is in one of his black moods, Harry is suddenly there while I peel fruit for my breakfast.

"Harry, good morning, you surprised me. You never come at this hour." My hair is wet from my morning bath and I have yet to change my form. Within a moment it is done. "Is that Beaubourg Berry?" I ask to distract him. It's the name of a café we used to frequent in Paris, and also what we've baptized the rare plant whose seeds, roasted, are a sort of coffee. The taste brings back everything we have lost, and so it's probably good it's hard to find. Tasting coffee in the square in Nice, or at the coffee shop down the street from his London apartment, is like heaven and hell appearing suddenly in this island setting.

My companion is setting up the precious saucepan that is one of our prized possessions. No matter how many times we ask, the ministry won't send us any more cookware—most likely because they must think I'm using it for potions. So we still have only one of everything, and right now he has both kettles to use in one of his alcohol distilling experiments.

He turns from conjuring the flame and two green eyes are looking at me. It makes me feel strange. I don't like it. Absently I put a piece of fruit in my mouth. Harry leans forward with open mouth and I feed him. He licks my fingers and rubs up against me like a cat.

We take turns feeding each other the fruit we have called a Gamlette because it is smaller than a Gamla fruit but just as delicious, and I make him eat some of the nuts he finds excessively bitter but which I assure him have some nutrients we would otherwise lack.

"Do you want beri beri?" I ask severely in response to his routine complaints, and he laughs delightedly the way he sometimes does when my old professorial air returns. This is one specter that can't hurt him anymore.

The drink is about to boil over so he hastens to turn off the flame while I levitate a coconut down from a tree. We mix in some of the milk and drink silently, our respective vanished civilizations thick around us, pleasantly dark and smoky in our throats.

Then my breakfast visitor is gone. His finally realized full-scale desalination project is a marvel of engineering and will allow him to make the terraced gardens he has long been imagining a reality. Soon we will request the shrunken live seedlings from the ministry and we'll see if they survive the journey.

Tomatoes!

We're beside ourselves with the culinary possibilities when we conjure up tomatoes in our collective memory at night.

Harry starts popping in at strange times. Usually I'm at work. It's not difficult to catch me with my alembics because I am either working on my research or distilling new potions based on island ingredients as many as 16 hours a day. The rest of my waking hours are spent checking and repairing my traps, foraging for potions ingredients and food, and, shamefully, bathing as often as I can.

It's not that I feel dirty or even hot most of the time. It's just very soothing to be neck-deep in the deepest part of my stream, relaxing in the heat of the day with the canopy overhead. My mind seems clearest in this perfectly clear water. This is where I get new ideas for potions, most often. Also the birds like to visit and watching their games splashing in the water makes me truly happy. I forget about my body that way for as much as an hour at a time, and it is only with reluctance that I remove my toes from the white sand at the deepest bottom and my legs are no longer tickled by the tiny water insects.

"Bathing again?" The voice suddenly is at my back.

My body's in-between characteristics are gone in a second and I turn around a man again to the man who has apparated much closer than usual.

"This morning I got a new idea for a fermented drink. Why don't we try making a kind of rum out of that reed you said was edible?" Harry's favorite subject is our faulty little distillery, which produces caustic substances more often than not. We talk about it while he settles behind me and helps with the long process of combing my hair just like he used to. Then I dress it in the gypsy style that has become normal to me.

"You'd have made an excellent gypsy," comes the voice from behind me as he watches me hide the sharpened bone as the finishing touch to the network of braids. In the old days it used to be a tiny dagger, but that was confiscated during our humiliating strip-search at the Ministry.

"You know how to flatter me." The color on my cheeks betrays my pleasure. This changeable man has taken to bringing me gifts these days, including efforts at more complicated cookery, and is making more of an effort to please me than I can ever remember. It's disarming. No one has ever tried so hard to learn what I liked except his mother, and that's an unnerving connection. "Luckily the unkempt Robinson Crusoe look is actually my favorite on you, because you've never given one thought to your appearance that I can tell."

"I've never had to," he says gazing straight into my eyes. "You take care of all that."

Harry picks up a twig and charms it to a sharp edge so that I can give him his monthly haircut. He inspects the results in a conjured mirror with little interest. "Just as I'm the reflection you don't have."

Suddenly his hands are taking off my clothes while he's mumbling. He reverses the transfiguration!

"Harry, no!" I draw the illusion around me again and back away. This is too sudden. I don't know if I'll ever be ready to share what I've become.

"So now I'm not man enough for you or something?" he says in one of those irrational turns of logic that frighten me so because they seem to belie something being not right in his mind. "Freakish bitch."

He is gone.

Long ago I gave up trying to understand what was going on in his mind or if I should feel responsible for it. I just spread a general attitude of guilt over myself and return to my work, ready to accept any blame he should choose to hurl at me over our psychic connection if that will help end this latest sojourn into Harry's sexual problems.

It's amazing that I can still get aroused around him, because it's like walking into a huge prison pavilion with the expectation of finding freedom.

We do, surprisingly often.

Perhaps it's only unending stupidity that gets us over the threshold of disbelief that we should have about our ability to create anything good together.

But I honestly don't want my sometimes-partner to be the reflection I lack at this time. I don't want to see what kind of hideous gryphon-like creature I've become. Not having to face it is the only way I've managed to ignore this latest trial. Neck-deep in water, my form is handily blurred from the neck down. The water is forgiving. It dissolves all concerns like gender and shape. I am part of it and it accepts me, welcomes me.

I have never refused Harry unless his health was obviously in jeopardy. But this is a personal horror I just don't want to share. Should that be so upsetting? He has the rest of me, the me he's always had.

Apparently yes. This refusal makes him boil with anger that I can feel without even accessing our magical link. Then after over a week it begins to calm. Maybe he's smoked himself into accepting this one small bit of privacy I ask for.

In the middle of the night I am lost to dreams of learning the dolphin language, as I've longed to do since I was a child.

He is in me before I can transfigure that part of me away.

As if he knew exactly how much I didn't want to have him reflect my new condition, Harry's horrid black-pearl self narrates in excruciating detail everything he discovers about this new feature. I learn that he has no experience with women at all, and try to count it as a mercy that at least he isn't telling me how I don't measure up with a regular female. All the while I'm wishing I were somewhere else, but am unable to look away from the black hole in the center of this creature that still thinks of itself as Harry.

Would any sexual contact like this feel like a violation because I didn't ask for this part, or is it just because I'm being violated in it?

This hardened man's well-established liking for dirty talk is inspired to new depths of depravity, as a whole unexplored landscape of humiliating language opens up for him. "At least he is discovering his liking for taking women against their will with me, who doesn't count, instead of while he was in England," I am thinking for British witches' sake while he presses me apart from inside.

And most of all, I hate that my body is letting him in now, against my will, and it bequeaths him with some sort of alien spasm that he takes as an orgasm, and thus, as my agreement with everything he just did to me.

Harry only rests for a moment to examine my body more closely than I've been able to stomach doing, devoting brutal scientific interest to his task of poking and squeezing and owning. Then he is taking me the usual way, with some new refinements, and my mind is trying to work out why I can't push him off, why I can't send him flying into the ocean. Is it that I think I deserve this? That this is finally enough payback for anything I've done to him? Or is it that this part of him is magically stronger than me?

Having my mind and body divorced from each other during a sex act has uncomfortable associations with my sessions on Voldemort's carpet. I take comfort in the idea that Harry can only do this to me so many times before he gets nosebleeds and can't walk.

Nursing my hope for that little vengeance, his final black climax ripples through me.

"I always thought you walked around just waiting to get fucked, but now I know you're just crying for it all over," he pants, his eyes dissecting me once again.

"That must be it," I say flatly and finally manage to regain control over my body. I transfigure myself into a bird and perch on the tallest tree I can find.


	66. Chapter 66

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 66: The Emissary

Over the next months I spend a lot of time learning how to be a fish, but when Harry is around I am a bird on the highest treetop or flying as far as the magical barrier surrounding our prison will let me. From a hundred feet in the air it's hard to feel like I'm in prison, either by consent to the ministry or in the always creative prison of my flesh.

I think of many things and nothing during this time. The idea of being a full-time bird is very attractive. My friends are so happy to fly with me, and it seems the only easy path left. Then I could perhaps find a way to fly out of the barrier around the island, disguising myself as a mote of dust on a bird's wing and then turning into my own bird-body once the barrier is crossed. A speck of my magical signature could surely get through the wards. I could then simply leave the island and abandon Harry to his own devices. I could evade the ministry perhaps indefinitely, and then even my inevitable execution seems like a long-forbidden pleasure that brings a smile of anticipation to my lips.

Being a fish or other water-dwelling creature will take some work, but that is the most attractive option yet. I've always loved the water, but after perhaps half an hour I start turning back into a man—or whatever monstrosity I am now—and the sensations associated with a mammalian drowning are very unpleasant. When I thrash and gasp it somehow feels like an insult to the graceful order of the deep.

Killing Harry never is really an option because I have no desire to outlive him, nor to absorb all of his existing Reaper's Reward and then more besides.

Nevertheless, simply flying near him makes me nearly drop out of the sky with a fit of heaving. Some of my bird friends have gathered what happened and begin an all-out war against Harry. He finds wither-weevils in his bedding and holes are pecked in some of his storage containers and rubber irrigation pipes.

I do nothing to encourage these actions, because mostly I am flying higher and higher, searching for the magical boundary I eventually find very high up in the sky. The birds watch me fly loops from the treetops up to this scalding-hot magical wall up near the clouds. I get close, many times, to ending things this way: by throwing myself on this masterpiece of a ward with that tiny bird-body and none of my defenses in place.

Eventually I come back to my human form and begin experimenting with ways to leave the island without the ministry realizing my magical signature is no longer there. With some work it becomes apparent that I can leave my body—a body—in place as if it is sleeping and create a for-all-intents-and-purposes double that visits some of the closest human outposts to what the birds told me long ago were Kirlbati and the Marshall Islands—the inhabited islands that appear near on the map to where Harry and I exist cloaked from the world.

When I finally set foot in civilization again I can't decide whether I feel strange because of my long banishment from other people, or because I've reappeared in the wrong form. On my visits I try relating to others using various bodies that all feel out-of-kilter and attempt to learn how to look at myself as something other than an abomination.

Ordering noodles from a street stand in one body, and then asking for directions in another, begins to show me that I am the same regardless: it is other people who tragically think one version of me can't kill them just as quickly as another. A couple of especially stupid people are left Stunned but I do nothing that might attract attention.

Mostly, this is a longed-for way to sell some potions to buy things we simply cannot get between ministry shipments—bread, rice, refined sugar, real coffee and tea, paper, airtight and watertight containers, and happily, more cookware.

Too ashamed to ask the ministry for something other than the serviceable trousers and men's shirts they send, I also return with some clothes that fit, comforted with the idea that men in many parts of Asia wear sarongs. Harry himself has a sort of skirt made of skins. But doubtless he will have some sport over my plain, unisex garments.

Just as he has been having sport with my body in my absence.

Apparently he sensed something different in my magic and went to investigate. My other body is semi-animate and responds to commands—

Perfect for his purposes.

We divide things like this now. When I leave he has his way with the me left behind. When I come back, he leaves me to my sarong and my work. I even share the rations I bring back with him and give him his own saucepan. My life is marked by a conspicuous lack of caring. If when I reunite with my other half in the morning I feel the bruises and tearing my unlucky double had to endure in the night, then I simply congratulate myself for missing the worst of it.

When he asks me for a potion to fight off the side effects of too much sexual contact with me, a horrible sound comes out of my throat that must be a barking sort of laugh.

When he nearly drowns from weakness he starts leaving me alone a little more, but that's small comfort.

My nights away are getting longer and longer, restrained only by the concern that I will permanently split in two and leave a defenseless wisp of me as Harry's full-time concubine.

When the letter comes.

Occasionally Harry will get correspondence included with a ministry shipment, so that's our only connection with the world (other than my unsanctioned wanderings). So when an exhausted-looking bird drops a weather-beaten envelope in my lap I am shocked.

"Where did you come from?"

"New Zealand," it croaks and then devours the dried fish I throw it.

The envelope is actually some kind of oilskin canvas, with an address in indelible marker, "Julian Moreau, c/o Severus Snape, The End of the World."

With trembling hands I gently separate the pages from their covering. The moisture has gotten inside so that the ink is mostly illegible. I have to patiently expose each sheet to a magical steam from my cauldron in order to reveal the writing, which lasts only for a moment.

The feeling of Shanti almost knocks me over, and I'm sobbing by the end of it.

_Dearest Julian,_

_I saw your magical friends exchanging letters via bird on several occasions, but the few times I have seen them since you left they have assured me it would be impossible for a bird to find you wherever you are being kept._

_They tried to give me some stupid explanation for why you were no longer around, but the bartender Gregor gave me the magical papers the others tried to hide, and I learned you were banished and not dead._

_I was angry with you for a long, long time, wishing you had trusted me enough to tell me the truth, hating you for stealing into my bed under false pretenses._

_One day the bird you used to keep showed up at my window. Anouk! I said, and called her in with some crumbs. We looked at each other and I knew she was missing you as I am. That's when I got the idea of sending her on at least the first leg of the journey to you, thinking she could tell her fellow birds what to do._

_It has been five months since you left and I don't know whether I still feel cheated that you didn't let me kick you out of my life with my own boot, or whether I am curious to know more about this Severus person you think you are. The idea that everything we shared was just a lie torments me, but it is almost worse to think it was the truth but another truth was stronger._

_Regardless, I miss someone who is one of your selves. And I'm concerned about you banished to the ends of the earth, which the wizard papers don't portray as very hospitable. But then perhaps you've been on the Outer Hebrides this whole time and they just thought it best to tell everyone you and Harry were safely far away._

_I know how you wizards lie._

_Either way, please write back if you can. And if you can't, know that I think of you fondly (at least some of the time) and think of me if you are able. I talk to Rukmini about you often. She, for one, is the same._

_Yours,_

_Shanti-ma_

The ruined pages are folded up and stuck under my top so I can feel her close to my heart. Such a warm memory against the cold reality of my new body drives home the new facets all over again.

In Asia I had sex once each as every possible gender configuration and realized that all that coupling business is past for me. It all seems like mechanical squirming between strangers. I want no part of it. The problem for me isn't gender, it never was. It's just that people are closed to me.

And now I am closed to them.

Or was, comfortably so, until Shanti came back into my life.

With my mind carefully shuttered I stay up all night thinking about the reply. When Harry comes slinking over I throw him into the sea and keep scratching on one of the leaves we use instead of paper. They're more durable than wood paper and I assume they will be more likely to reach her intact. In lieu of any oilskin I anoint a piece of cloth with some mixture of the pseudo-rubber and other compounds for waterproofness and general durability.

_Dearest Shanti-ma,_

_Forgive me that my reply is so tardy—it took your letter a year to reach me, but it finally did. I have been sneaking off to Indonesia and other nearby inhabited spots on certain nights, and that seems to be what finally located me on the international bird network's radar. This island is all-but-invisible even to them—only a small number of local birds are aware of it, and they tend to stay close by._

_To allay your fears: things are materially quite comfortable for us. Truly, any misery is of our own making, and even that is quite bearable. During most of our stay here, Harry and I have gotten along fine, sometimes very well, and the occasional ups and downs for two people who are alone in virtual prison are to be expected._

_I talk to you every night, Shanti. I was so foolish as to think I didn't miss you because your presence was so strong for me at times. But with your letter came the certainty that nothing can ever capture you, not a wish or an idea or a dream, nothing but the real you._

_Alas, I fear I may never see that you again. Worse, I am quite certain I don't deserve to. But for all of my sprawling inconsistencies and unlovely parts, I did and do and will love you. Whatever you have learned about me is only one tiny part of the tragedy and failure that is me—you probably don't want to know it all. But since I would never want to enjoy any amount of your favor that was based upon a lie, upon an overly generous assumption, not now, not again, I beg of you to think the worst of me so at least my conscience will be clear._

_Write back as soon as you are able. I was able to suggest to the birds the easiest way for them to reach you._

_All yours,_

_Severus_

_PS For both of our sakes, please burn this missive after you have read it._

What took the longest was the signature. In the end, I have no more room in my head for double identities or subterfuge, so I signed my name, hoping it doesn't let her in for any trouble.

Dawn has arisen in all its 360-degree glory on my little tropical jail cell, and I put the finishing protective spells on the packet and give it to one of the many birds who has volunteered for the first leg of the journey.

Astonishingly, I receive a reply in less than a month. Now that they know what they're looking for and the best route to take, my friends the birds are extremely fast. Shanti and I exchange a few more letters, each of mine with a carefully vague summary of life on the island.

No more do I go on nighttime sojourns. There's nothing to escape from, now that I've been reminded that what I'm looking for can't be found in Asia. My island is re-warded with the most complex labyrinth of spells yet, which will take Harry months to cut his way through.

Plus, my living quarters are now located in a new cave I hollowed out myself in a better location than the old. A true eagle's nest, I can only reach it myself by turning into a bird. There is a separate ward before the entrance, which basically requires someone to apparate in mid-air and then navigate through the barrier, something that Harry is unlikely to manage.

There is a spectacular view of both the sunrise and the sunset, a new, smaller alembic and a few other necessities. Best of all there is a protected cove inside with a hot spring. I bathe and forget about my body from the neck down, thinking of Shanti, allowing myself for the first time since my exile to skirt the edges of unhealthy immersion in fantasy.

I imagine her here, us cooking together and swimming and laughing. Above all laughing.

All of these scenarios are enough to make me nearly delusional with happiness. Making love is carefully kept off the list. That will never happen with anyone but her again, and she could never accept what I am now.

In my mind grows this rootless vision of a relationship that never could have been, never will be. This alternates with the despair about my status astride the division between the two halves of humankind, which even the birds don't know how to take.

The familiar signs of my catatonia begin to show themselves like an old friend. I catch myself staring into space and can't remember what I was doing. The birds will tell me that they've been trying to get my attention and I don't answer. My pain, that constant companion, begins to leave me, forging ahead into that place where it is different and I am different and I am free of the overwhelming thoughts about how things could have been different. Where we will meet again and have many dark conversations that will magically free me from the usual agonizing chipping away at time.

Yes, mother, it happened to me, too. The madness must be in our shared blood, and not just in my toxic magic. And when I think about any bond with my mother that is not based upon a blood debt owed from me to her, the relief is more than I merit. Then smite myself, but it almost doesn't hurt because the pain has made our snug nest in that other place for us.

The birds are right to call it the Nesting Sickness, and not just melancholy, as a Psychoneutic Practitioner might.

I begin to feel myself slipping away from time and wonder how long it will take before Harry comes over to drag me back with his signature method of slaps and tears, if he can cut through the wards and fly himself up here. In the meantime I keep doing the minimum to keep body and soul together.

One day I look out of my perch and the idea of rejoining the world doesn't seem so terrible. With a plan of going out to collect some fruit for my first meal in a day or two other than a few seeds, the sight of a boat in Harry's harbor makes me freeze. I assume Harry has managed to lure another unfortunate ship into his web, and am grateful.

When I hear voices uncomfortably close on my island, I turn into a bird and fly down.

I have just enough time to transform my body and clothing into something irreproachably masculine when Shanti and Harry look up from my old campsite.

"Seek three in one, again seek one in three. Dissolve, and condense, and thou shalt be master of the Art."

The Waterstone of the Wise

Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher

Harry looks smug about something as she and I embrace tearfully, but before he has a chance to say anything I've sent him over the cliff into the sea and knitted up the wards.

Though I knew that Harry would unravel the wards sooner or later, that leaves another question.

How did Shanti just march into one of the most heavily guarded invisible square miles on earth?

In my letters I'd told her roughly where I was, but you don't just set out in a motorboat pointed somewhere in the middle of the ocean east of Kirlbati and the Marshall Islands without knowing where you're going. Stammering, I tell her as much.

"I knew exactly where I was going. The minister himself told me. He gave me a magic compass."

"What!"

"Yes." This small muggle woman who is the very personification of happiness waits for me to catch up, as usual.

"You spoke with the Minister of Magic," I repeat, shaking my head. "I think I need potion to deal with this." I sit her down and prepare her a cup of our pounded and fermented root, which she accepts gratefully, while I throw down a phial of something stronger for me.

"Of course I spoke to him, at length. I threatened to report him to the European Council on Human Rights if he didn't let someone check on the two of you, as prisoners are supposed to be monitored for any medical needs. And since no wizard was brave enough to do so, I was appointed temporary emissary for health of the British Ministry of Magic, Correctional Division. They even paid my way."

"You realize the ministry is not party to any international treaties or its existence even recognized by any muggle laws," is the only thing I can think to say.

"Which is exactly how they want to keep it," she replies, a wicked smile on her face.

"Formidable," I say in French, and she rewards me with one of her dazzling smiles.

"Are you having any medical emergency?" she pursues playfully.

Yes, as a matter of fact, but she's the last person I want to tell.

"Harry was kind enough to acknowledge that he would have died of gangrene several times over if it wasn't for me," I say bitterly. "But no, we are doing very well. It's a very healthy lifestyle if you can manage to keep from smoking the local intoxicant."

"Yes, he's quite high, isn't he?" she says with a giggle. Her carelessness surprises me. This is the young man who she was afraid would kill her, and from what I know now, she has every reason to fear him.

Par la Rose-Croix! I will not put Shanti in danger!

With a knot in my stomach I point her back towards the boat.

"Shanti, it is a wonderful surprise to see you, but I must remind you that we are a dangerous little bunch—murderers and indicted sex fiends, some of us several times over," I say gently. It doesn't bear thinking on what Harry might be capable of doing to her in the dark of night, considering how much he hated her at one time and his new interests now. "I don't know that it's such a good idea for you to stay. Perhaps you can stay at one of the neighboring islands and visit during the daylight for a couple days…"

"Julian—Severus, I had thought it would be odd seeing you look different, but you annoy me just as much no matter what you look like," she retorts, reminding me that the form I had chosen as less offensive was still very new to her. "I did not extort a head of state and travel halfway around the world to be put up on some random island. I'm here to stay on YOUR island. Aren't you going to give me a tour?"

We spend the next few hours doing everything I had dreamed of—discussing the medicinal quality of the local plants, touching on some of the animal lore that we've been collecting, sampling some of the berries and seeds, and sending a call out to some of the larger fish for a special stew.

Together we prepare the meal and it doesn't matter that we're squatting over a fire in the middle of nowhere, instead of her Paris apartment. The food smells better than it has since I arrived, and when it is ready I'm actually hungry for a change.

"Wait, let me go get Harry," Shanti says as I start scooping the stew into coconut shells.

"I haven't said much about it—" I begin.

"He did. I was on his island for two days talking things over." she says simply and goes to the edge of the island where Harry was apparently waiting with two necklaces made of flowers and some of his homemade wine. Taking him by the hand she leads him through my carefully laid magic as if it didn't exist.

"You've told him," Harry says with a knowing air, regarding my stock-still posture by the fire.

"Yes, he seems to be taking it rather better than I expected."

"You were on Harry's island for two days," I'm standing there with a shell in my hand, half-filled. "You were here and didn't tell me?"

Harry, seeing the signs of my building upset more clearly than our guest, takes the shell from me and assumes the role as host.

"We had some things to discuss," Shanti's eyes transmit the message that if I raise a fuss she'll raise one back. "The instrument the ministry gave me to help me navigate here also rendered the boat invisible—I suppose they didn't want to call attention to these unmapped islands. I happened upon Harry's island first—well, he was the only one who came out to investigate." They exchange a look that comprehends all of my mental woes that I know of and some besides. "We agreed that if you haven't been up and about that was a perfect chance for us to get acquainted." She beams at Harry and he seems just as helpless as I would be before that smile.

Has he touched her? Worse yet, has he told her? Hermés!

Again, Harry decodes my expression instantly. "Have some stew, Severus, you need to put some weight on. I've been telling Shanti about how you seem to have a talent for getting cabin fever and that turns your island paradise into your own personal hell."

From his look and tone, I take this to mean he hasn't said anything about one particular hell. Mechanically, I eat, half-listening to Shanti catch Harry up on the goings-on in the world. They're talking of television shows and movies and politics and they break out the bottle of Harry's fruit wine. Because I feel like this occasion deserves it, I fetch one of my potions to add to it so that I can relax a little with them.

Finally, I can stand it no longer.

"How did the Ministry of Magic just send you off to the ends of the earth to spend time with two such as us?"

Harry sends a murderous glance in my direction.

"Well, to spend time with the Alkahest, then. They put nothing past me. Do they not have the slightest regard for muggles at all?"

Harry and Shanti get a fit of giggles.

"I can assure you, madam, the French invented the oublette and the French Magical Authority still employs it," Harry intones in a spot-on imitation of the Minister, who was his boss, after all.

"What? You talked of torture with the minister?"

"My case about human rights wasn't very convincing, so I changed tactics and tried to shame your minister into thinking that his state is far behind others in that arena and it would be a big black eye for him if this was discovered."

Shanti drags Harry to his feet and they enact the conversation.

"I am a citizen of both France and England, and have friends in the Wizard World in Paris, Monsieur Minister, and I think that in none of these places would you like to be known as a party to the inhumane treatment of prisoners."

Harry squares his shoulders. "Madam, the fact that everything sounds better in French does not extend to the screams of the prisoners that are moldering away in their prisons, in much less comfortable quarters than these two men enjoy on their islands, I might add." But the political consequences of the French ministry showing up his own are beginning to change minister's—Harry's—manner, and he utters the line about the oublettes.

Now Shanti does her tipsy best to make the most of her slight stature. "That may be so, but at least they have a witch doctor come by now and again to separate the quick from the dead!"

"You said witch doctor?" I'm shocked and delighted. This term that was used to dismiss colonial people's native arts was first a pejorative directed at my society's healing tradition. It's very insulting to our kind, particularly to a head of state.

"Yes, and they didn't just give me this device and tell me how to rent a boat. I had to sign reams and reams of parchments with those tiresome quills and not the slightest idea of what I was signing. Then when it was done—" Harry cackles and she shushes him in that way that I know well. He preens himself a little, the way I would. As if reading my thoughts, she gives me a fierce look. "Then when it was done, he says in a sudden impulse to be genteel, he said—"

Harry composes himself to imitate his old employer, "You see, madam, if your relation was not such a—delicate—case, he would be held in Azkaban, and you could write to him as often as the rules there allow. But as it is, we have to keep a tight control over these prisoners or they will be prisoners no more."

"Relation?" Shanti and I say together in identical wonder.

"Aren't you some muggle relation of The A—Severus Snape's?"

"He's my lover," Shanti says flatly and regards the comic surprise Harry's face reflects. "How could anyone ever think we're related?"

And the three of us drunkenly take in the tiny Shanti, with her delicate features and warm brown skin, next to the lanky, hatchet-faced bloodless man I am at the moment, even with a slight tan.

Harry makes some elegant gesture with his hand. "Please do not take offense, Madam, but all muggles look alike to me."

We share the last of the bottle and it's not enough to calm our hysterical laughter.

"What did you say to that?" I ask, feeling and odd sympathy for the minister at having chosen the wrong muggle to say such a thing to.

"I told him that that's all very well, the part of you that they can hold in prison, I leave to the wizards and all their magical ways. The part of you they can't incarcerate, that's the part my muggle tastes are interested in. "

Harry's magic pokes me and we exchange a look over her head. "I see what you mean," is the gist of it.


	67. Chapter 67

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 67: Settled

_"Then are there three abiding in the same place, until the precious body is dissolved, and is decomposed and dies. But after a time the spirit and the soul are brought back by gentle warmth, and hold once more their former seat. Then you have the essence; no perfection is wanting, and the work is glorified by a joyful end."_

_The Waterstone of the Wise_

_Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher_

After we finish the bottle Harry pulls out his pipe and the pouch of his weed, and Shanti appears to have gotten a taste for it because she accepts a share. Me, I'm already a bit intoxicated and see no reason not to continue the venture.

Then the three of us lean back and look at the patch of sky few humans have contemplated.

"You know, the minister reminded me a bit of you, Ju-Severus," Shanti says dreamily.

Harry bursts out laughing as I stiffen in rage. "They are both from Old Families, you know," he says to Shanti with audible capitals designed to infuriate.

"How dare you compare me to the wizard who would happily display my hide for the use of public sport?" An uncomfortable thought comes to me that the minister is exactly what my grandmother would have made of me if she could, and the drug makes this idea ignite into easy anger. Shanti takes her dose of fury calmly, and then I turn on Harry. "And you—how can you keep harping on this Old Family of mine that disowned me when I was ten?"

They have no way of knowing how this mistake about my family was the cause of the tragic rupture between me and his mother, but the injustice of that event has never stopped rankling.

"The thing about people from Old Families is that they have to be the ones in control, and they can never let down their guard."

"Well, that explains a lot," Shanti shoots Harry another one of those looks they seem to share every few minutes. They're getting nearer and nearer to That Look.

"It's the reason why he can't ask for anything, is my theory," continues Harry. "He'd rather die of it than ask for help."

"That's why the greatest wisdom, in my opinion, is in choosing friends wiser than oneself."

Shanti's hand is sliding down my leg and for a moment it erases my irritation.

Then I see she's doing the same on Harry's thigh.

Did they plan this? Did they do this already on his island? Par le trismegiste!

But I look at Harry and can tell underneath his cocky grin that he's afraid. This is not something he's ever done.

He's not as afraid of Shanti as much as he is afraid of me. Of seeing me care for someone else, of letting me go just a little bit from the tight hold he's needed to keep on me for his own sanity.

My fears are too many to name.

Shanti takes us in hand.

She settles us.

In that way she has, she puts things in their proper place. Settling things never felt so enlivening before I met her.

Out of the corner of my eye, I'm studying Harry, my very recent memories of his brutality just barely held back by the intoxicants and our guest's healing presence. He can do what he likes to me, but I worry about what he could do to her.

Harry sends a calm look in my direction. He knows. He knows I'm watching and he knows I'm concerned and he's glad of it. Harry depends on me watching the worst of him just as I depend on the same treatment in return.

But it is to this audacious muggle woman we turn the best of us. Parts of ourselves we had forgotten we had bloom suddenly on this night, and we lay them in her lap.

I'm far too intoxicated by this point to conceptualize why that might be a horrendous idea, why all of it might be a bad idea.

It all felt very good at the time.

In the end I revive the dying fire and fetch us some water from the stream to come back to her kissing him. They accept the water and then draw me into their little knot so we can all stare at each other.

Harry and I are wishing we knew this magic of Shanti's that makes knowing what we know so easy for a change.

Shanti knows what we're thinking and handles this gulf in knowledge much more gracefully than we do when wielding our own magic in front of her.

They exchange a glance that comprehends the solidarity they feel as two people who have had to cope with me, which is apparently so awesome a challenge that they are fast allies after only two days.

And they know that I see it. And feel sorry for me that the burden I pose is so great.

Harry watches as Shanti and I exchange some sort of look about the challenges of living with him, and they both know that I'm holding back about something gone wrong between Harry and me, and that nothing will get it out of me.

At last we stop the infinite recursion of looks and fall asleep in what is left of the warm tropical night.

We all go for a morning swim to shake off the surprisingly mild hangover, and Harry and Shanti splash each other, laughing, while I swim out farther, far enough that I can assume my true form without her seeing. Thankfully, Harry hasn't told her, perhaps rightfully fearing that she would sense there was something unhealthy in his relationship towards my new body. Worrying about telling her is eating away at the edges of this unhoped-for peace with her, with the three of us.

Eventually she has to return to her life in Paris, but she promises to send us better rations and supplies than we've been getting. Shanti also takes some potions to sell in Paris for me, in what will surely be the first muggle brokering a deal in the apothecary in the French Diagon alley. "Don't take less than 300 galleons for each!" I admonish her, sure that she will do fine.

Harry and I wave goodbye, both already looking forward to her next shorter trip in two months.

"Are you talking to me again?" he asks when I turn away.

"Hardly," I reply and go back to my island to regain my true form and change into the unisex clothes that feel better to me now than trousers.

That night Harry stands at the edge of my island and shouts until I have to acknowledge him. He's wearing only pants and is dripping from the swim. He has a flower necklace in his hand.

"Just because I've seen that you can treat one woman like a gentleman doesn't mean I have any illusions about you," I snap.

"You're not a woman," he points out, scraping his eyes down my body that I refuse to transfigure.

"What am I to you then? A plaything? A curiosity?" I shoot back, taking the necklace and putting it on while he's taking off my clothes.

"You're Severus," he says with an anguish and a reverence that are more than I had hoped for from him. "And If I have almost killed myself having sex with you before this, how do you think I'm supposed to stop now?" he asks, using the same gentle, avid hands he used on me and Shanti just last night. He's sober for a change, and because of that he gives me the mercy of an anxious look before his mouth does its work on me. He transforms me into something better than I could ever conceive of to transfigure into. He offers me himself and I accept him, at first reticently, and then with joy.

We explode into the surf and the sand at the edge of my little world.

He leads me into the water for a night swim in the shallows, rightly guessing that I would feel relaxed enough to talk in the water.

"Tell me why you are so angry," he begs.

The most terrifying part of it is that he doesn't know.

"You know all about my troubled sexual awakening," I begin, treading water and sensing the fish murmuring nearby. "It was much more terrible than it had to be, discovering I liked other boys, finding out about my condition. No one cared enough to tell me anything, I found that horrible book—

"—Bigham's Book. Yes, I found a copy once. Hair-raising stuff. You know that most of it was his own 'Incongruencies', as he called them?"

"Yes, he died in a madhouse. Well, his vision of the world shaped mine at fifteen and for long after. Then some people I really cared about made me do some things I didn't want to do." If I can keep him from ever finding out his father's and Sirius' real relationship with me, and their role in making me the toy of half the school, I will die happy. "I think it was at that time it became very hard for me to be anything more than a passive participant in sex."

"But you love that. We love that," Harry objects in a hurt tone. "Sorry, I promised myself I would listen."

"I think the distinction I'm trying to make is between choosing something for oneself and having it be chosen for you. Between thinking you have good things to give sexually, and feeling like a mutant."

He nods, his face serious.

"The way you have approached my—new—body has been worse than all of that. It's the injustices visited upon me by the entire school jeering at me for being a cocksucker, by Bigham, by Dumbledore for forbidding any sexual expression or closeness on school grounds, by Voldemort," his face contorts, "because this time I was an adult who thought he knew who he was. It was my body completely changing in a way I hadn't looked for and didn't understand. And it was you, you of all people, Harry, exploiting this uncertainty for a little diversion in a boring place."

He ducks his head under and surfaces closer to shore. I swim languidly far out to sea and return to find him standing knee-deep in the surf, trying to catch minnows by moonlight.

When I'm standing beside him he says without looking at me, "I've become everything I hate."

"It's no matter, love," I say, putting my arm around him. "That's happened to me so many times I can't count."

He lets me spend the night on his island for the first time as myself. My new self, even.

We talk long into the night about the worst things we've done. For perhaps the first time, when we lay down together I don't feel his amorphous anger at me-Voldemort, whoever permanently warped his sexuality at 17, lying down with us.

In the middle of the night he wakes me. "If I'd forgiven you like this sooner, stopped making you pay for things that weren't your fault sooner, would I have stopped myself from murdering those men?"

He never speaks of the events that led us to our respective exiles.

"Harry, my heart, I don't know. We just can't know, and maybe that's a mercy." We hold each other in the godforsaken perch right on the edge of the world, feeling like the slightest move will send us plunging off into the void, the void that is held at bay only as long as we can hold on to each other's bodies. Whatever shape they may take is a mere detail.

Maybe it is knowing we can look forward to Shanti coming that makes us work harder to make our islands more inhabitable and ourselves better men. Maybe the peace she has given us, something we probably couldn't have achieved on our own, grants us the calm needed to just enjoy our work. Or it could be that a reckoning has finally been achieved between me and Harry after all these years that leaves us finally able to simply live.

Our score is settled.

The small and large ways Harry had of making me pay for something he intellectually admitted was not my fault had mined our relationship with unhealth. Now in the weeks after Shanti's visit, when he notices himself trying to bully me into doing something or wheedling me for physical contact without coming to some type of peace with me first—he catches himself.

He holds himself back from things I didn't mind very much, like his favorite dirty terms during lovemaking or the way he has always divided us into rigid roles, with him as the very manly one and me as something attractively yet pathetically other.

"I'm still the morose navel-gazer I always was," I remind him one day when we're pounding roots. It's hot, the steamy weather that makes life totally unbearable before a storm, and we're both wearing our loin-cloths and nothing else. "I'm a difficult, self-absorbed human being and not many people have been able to put up with me for long, Harry. Please stop over-analyzing everything you do," I beg, as I see his hand move to caress me quite naturally before he checks the gesture. "It makes me feel even worse about this change when you treat me differently."

He caresses me and kisses me for a few moments and then we go back to pounding peaceably.

"But I did want to ask you about something."

He drops his stone.

"Things have been so good, Severus—you're not going to say something to ruin it like you do, are you?" He is afraid. It's what I have come to recognize as the fear of the prisoner—someone whose existence is so fragile, is made up of so little, that when one of these few pillars starts to shake the whole enterprise of living flashes fragilely across the face.

"It's about your health," I pursue because I can't handle the worry on my own anymore. "We've been making love more often than we have since we got to the island. Normally I trust you to stay away when the side effects become too severe. Are you hiding the nosebleeds and the dizziness from me out of some misguided attempt to save my feelings? You've been swimming every day, far from shore, and it makes me sick with worry to watch you. You can't drown on me, I won't let you do it just for the sake of a swordfish." My voice is rising now in spite of myself, higher than I normally let it go with my careful attempts to keep that one feature the same. "Don't make me live without you."

He is looking at me with no expression and suddenly he bursts out laughing. It's not unlike the laugh people used to have when they saw my true face and were mating with their deepest desires, not me.

"Severus, you have a talent for making me live through terrible moments, only surpassed by your ability to work yourself up over nothing," he says, his arms and chest strong and hot against mine. "I'm working on a treatise called 'Alkahests in the wild' and I'm going to tell people the truth about you creatures—melancholic, obsessive, arrogant, insufferable—" he punctuates each of these adjectives with a kiss.

I thrust him away. "I'm not a fool to be put off by pinches and platitudes," I assert, not liking the way my voice is different these days when I get upset. "Have you discovered some way to keep your magical energy intact and not TOLD me, not after years of experimentation and constant worry?" I'm in a snit now. I'm trembling with rage and he presses himself back, frightened by the release of raw magic.

"How are you hiding it from me!" I roar.

He slaps me.

"I'm sorry, Sev, I didn't want to," he says when I gape at him, my hand to my cheek. "You're working yourself up to some sort of fit. Look what you did to those trees." He points to the stand of coconuts that are now twisted together and mangled. "We only have that other stand on my island. What would we do without coconut milk?"

His down-to-earth reasoning about out staple food finally calms me down and I laugh. "Coconut prawn stew is my favorite," I admit, but he's not laughing with me. "I hate it when you look at me like you're frightened of me."

"I hate it when you act like a hurricane," he snaps back and I bite back the insult about his frightening qualities.

"So then tell me."

"There's nothing to tell!" He gets up and kicks at the sand. "Goddammit, Severus, why can't you ever just be happy that something, some ONE thing in our miserable fucking existences, turned out right?"

"What do you mean it turned out?" I demand, standing as well. "What right do you have to fault me for not being happy about something when I don't even know what it is?"

"Coconut, darling," he prompts, reminding me of my anger. I grit my teeth. "I'm telling you I feel fine, that we seem to be able to have sex as much as we want, and you're turning this into some huge ugly deal! God, I wish I didn't want to so bad, even right now that you're annoying the bloody hell out of me."

He turns away, pressing down his rising excitement.

In a moment I'm on him, my hand wresting his away. "You mean you're really not feeling terrible? Truly? No nosebleeds, no fatigue?"

He watches me scrabble some stones and shells out of the sand. "What are you doing?"

"Cast for me. Use whatever divination system makes the most sense to you, but do a reading."

"Right now?" he asks, miserably distracted with another concern.

"Now," I pull him with my whole strength into the sand and he picks out the right number of dark and light and in-between shapes, then he shakes them in his hand and casts the reading

"Again."

He casts again.

"Once more."

"Do it again."

"Severus, what—"? But I'm flying him through the trees up to my private laboratory. It's something I've scarcely ever done with him, and, like all wizards used to flying with brooms, it frightens him to death.

We do the full magical testing series, him telling me which pure potions feel right in which place. We do it for hours. I make him wait while I retrieve other herbs and flowers that have rare or borderline significations. He's getting exhausted—most people aren't used to using their innate sense of Spagyrics like I am—but I force him to Categorize everything as a yes or a no, until we have dozens and dozens of rejected items, feathers, shells, confused looking beetles, on the floor and the alembic is more filled in that it ever has been.

"Well done, Severus, I was feeling superb up until you ran me through the wringer," Harry says, sinking back against the stone wall. "There's your true genius for you."

"Look, Harry," I say, turning the wire contraption so that the cages with each substance turn in different directions. "How stupid of me, of course you can't see it." I make each substance glow the right color and turn again, at one angle then another, fast and slow.

"What am I looking at?" he says dully, sampling some of the seeds from the reject pile.

"That's you," I breathe. "That's your magic."

He sits up. I point out some of the frequent arrays of divination stones we've often struggled with, and then point out the line going straight through the meridian, the slice at the diameter, which corresponds to the pattern he just cast again and again on the beach.

"That's the key, the slice that unlocks all the others. You must have approached this magical state and that's why you keep casting it over and over. You're not only healthy, my love, you're perfectly balanced," I gush, not caring how my voice sounds while I put an arm around him and kiss him. "Maybe it's the sea air," he looks at me reproachfully, "or maybe it's how hard you've worked at being your best self." He accepts the compliment now and we turn the alembic over and over again.

"It's really true? I'm healed?" he asks in a small voice.

"That is beyond my expertise. I don't know anything about the practical application of this magic, but you will go down in the history of alchemy as being one of the few who has managed to fit all the pieces of his personal world together."

"Can you get me down from here?" my companion suddenly asks. "And by the way, never just grab me up like a pelican and fly me without permission like that. I hate it."

Meekly I gather him in my arms and count to three before flying us down. "Is something the matter?" I ask.

He checks an impatient gesture. "I just need to think, all right? This is all a lot to digest. See if you can fix those coconut trees. I'll be back."

When he doesn't return for three days, naturally I assume the worst. I've already brewed chastity potions keyed to each of our magical signatures and am ready to take the first dose of mine when my fellow prisoner apparates next to me. He looks exhausted but happy. "Here."

Using pieces of wire left over from his engineering projects, along with some choice bits of shell, stone and seaglass, Harry has made a tiny but perfect little replica of his balanced magical signature. It's strung on a thong of cured fish leather. A similar one hangs around his own neck.

"You know I can't really think about things without using them in some way," my friend shrugs, reminding me of all of our shielding lessons so long ago, which revealed his quick mind and excellent intuition, neither of which had shown themselves in the more theoretical class work Hogwarts favors.

My eyes are traveling from his face to the charm and back again. "This is exquisite," I finally say. "And it feels—just like you." I close my eyes and balance it in my hand. The Spagyrics are impeccable. "I couldn't have done a better job Categorizing the stones myself. Unquestionably powerful. Puts many of the foolish baubles sold as magical items on Diagon Alley to shame."

He beams at me and hangs it around my neck. "When you figure out yours we'll add that charm too," he says.

Up until now I'd only focused on my own signature as much as I had to for lack of volunteers, but experience had shown time and again that almost nothing about me was normal, so it seemed foolish to try and extrapolate the human condition from someone barely hanging on the edge of the species.

But at that moment, with Harry's hand closing mine around the heat and curiosity and power radiating from the piece of him in my palm, I want nothing more than to have a piece of myself hanging next to him.

"I'll look into it," I promise, and we go for a nighttime walk with our feet in the surf and our arms around each other. We don't need to talk for a long time until he halts us with the ocean wind whipping at our clothes and our hair. "You're a genius, Severus," he says and puts his hand on my mouth. "I've always avoided mentioning it because it's one more thing to make you different, but this symbol feels very powerful to me. I went to Hawaii."

"You what? Do you want to go to Azkaban?" I shriek.

"Nothing happened, did it? The ministry would send someone in a minute if they thought one of us had left. All I did was leave a version of this symbol in my bed and apparate to Hawaii. The first time I've managed to apparate over a large body of water," he points out.

"That's right," I say, absently, remembering that most wizards can't. "What did you do in Hawaii?" I ask, feigning a casual air. It's not so much jealousy that he might have had a casual sexual encounter, but fear at what that might have loosed in him.

"Love, I didn't do anything. I didn't have any money, but some people were having a barbecue on the beach and they shared some with me. Meat is better than I remembered." He acknowledges my fearful look. "I didn't hook up with anyone, but I did happen across two guys getting together on the beach and I watched for a little while."

"How was that?" I say, my heart in my throat.

"Fine. Just curiosity, really. It reminded me that that's what was normal to us for so long."

"Do you miss it?" My voice is tight.

"I miss sitting around with a bunch of people passing a bottle and laughing. I miss electricity and showers and junk food. Crisps! Ice cream! Next time I'm definitely bringing some money."

"Next time?"

"Yes, do whatever that thing is you do to split yourself in two and let's go for a weekend. Tomorrow."


	68. Chapter 68

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 68: The Great Rite

First I sell some of my potions in Indonesia and apparate back with a huge sum of money.

Then I have what is probably the best time of my life in Hawaii. We stay for five days, foolishly risking someone from the ministry noticing or some irreparable harm to my other self left behind. Harry and I have so seldom been able to walk around together as ourselves. The bearded, sun-browned Harry is not recognizable as himself. And Harry assures me that whatever process I've gone through has made my features make a different sort of sense that no one, but no one, would ever think of as Severus Snape.

"Let's get a hotel room," I suggest and this grown man with the faint outlines of his old vegetable tattoos on his arms and chest actually claps his hands and jumps up and down.

It's all we can do to stop marveling at the air conditioning and running water and soft beds, but we force ourselves out into the world. We buy proper clothes, and I allow Harry to pick things out that embarrass me. We eat in restaurants. We see a movie that doesn't even make sense to us because we are so overstimulated by the whole experience, holding each other while Harry laments that he didn't bring his hallucinogenic herb to make the experience syrupy and enjoyable.

We meet other couples and introduce ourselves as Harry and Siva. We hold hands and walk on the strange civilized beach that is so different from the one we know as another part of ourselves back home in prison.

The last night I wear the clothes Harry bought me against my will and we go to a very fancy restaurant. Watching all of the jaws working together at the fine food is so strange—both oddly affected and yet bizarrely animalistic. I let Harry perform all of the courtly gestures he wishes and we happily order something other than fish and drink real wine.

When dessert comes he gets for what I assume is a visit to the lavatory and then drops to his knees. "Severus Jacques Theophrastus Belacqua Laurent Snape." His voice is soft but it makes the restaurant go quiet. "Will you marry me?"

The stem of my wineglass snaps in my hand and I catch the goblet with the other before it falls.

"Yes?" I say, so perplexed that the congruence that is in 99 percent of my being is colored by the one percent that doesn't believe how this is happening. He slips a bit of twisted wire on my hand and the restaurant applauds when he kisses me.

"I've always wanted to know what it would be like for people to not think we shouldn't be together," he whispers in my ear.

We are given free champagne and the owner of the restaurant comes out to shake Harry's hand and kiss mine. "Such a beautiful woman," he murmurs into his mustache.

I look over my shoulder and then remember.

"Thank you, sir," I say and everyone makes a discreet retreat.

My blood is boiling and I can't bear to let Harry know how upset I am by this ridiculous gesture.

Perhaps one of the strongest indications of a culture is the way people agree to marry. Even little Severus the shut-in, ignorant of so much wizarding culture, knew how magically inclined people got engaged. My grandmother described it to me many times from the parties she conjured for.

The man takes his wand and points it at his heart—that a wizard would ever point his wand at himself is, of course, a significant risk. He utters an incantation passed on by the ages and usually invoking an ancestor or some significant symbol. He draws a circle that blazes into magical flame, and the woman, if she is in agreement, takes the fiery ring with the tip of her wand and widens the circle of fire until it crackles over both their heads. Then she takes some trinket or lock of hair and draws the magic into that item and presents it to her intended. He wears it until their wedding day, at which time it is broken in two and infused into their rings.

I've seen it in person on the few occasions that a graduating student proposed to his girl at the last student dance at Hogwarts. I can assure you, it is quite moving. The Alkahest himself, who knows better than to hope for such a union, pictured the impossible happening in just that way.

I also saw two men perform the Great Rite—none other than Toby and Giancarlo. They were prevented from ever actually tying the knot, though not by any laws in Amsterdam's wizard society, which have long been very liberal. No, it was because the ceremony wouldn't be legal without using their real names, and such an act would call down the full weight of the law on both of their heads, both of which would fetch a high price if their true identities were ever registered with the authorities.

This didn't stop Giancarlo from proposing once every year or so, usually when he was blind drunk, at which time he'd been known to sing his suit in an astonishingly operatic voice to a blushing Toby.

These two criminals, they had their place in the back alleys of the Wizarding World.

Harry and I had not been welcomed as a couple by the vast majority of that society for some time before we were banished, but losing your culture entirely is a terrible loss.

Under the hideous muggle electric light, with their canned music and strange sauces and their odd frank looks, I suddenly feel entirely lost. This was not the way the impossible—love—was supposed to reach me. These people who will go home with a vague good feeling in their hearts, they cannot possibly understand what we have been through or what it might mean to blend two magics, especially two magics such as ours.

Harry is feeding me some muggle chocolate something-or-other that always lacks the bite of wizard chocolate. So that he doesn't suspect the sinking disappointment that is making me misty eyed—they all think I'm a woman overcome with emotion; would they be smiling so if they realized I'm a monster who misses its society, the society that hates it?—I force myself to talk.

"Dumbledore would have wished to have been your second," I say, referring to the tradition of the petitioner having another man with him—ostensibly for support, though the real origin has to do with a few women who were very insulted by a suit and included a rather awful spell in with the bauble.

"Do you really think so?"

"I know so, yes," and we exchange a devious look. We are suddenly exactly what we are, two wizards masquerading as a most improbable muggle couple.

In some small way, we've won.

When we eventually leave, almost all the money we have left goes towards a tip. It's no good where we're going, after all. Only when we're out in the garish muggle street does Harry speak. "I just suddenly wanted to do that. We know we have to live for the moment, right?" he says lightly. "Does marriage even mean anything in a civilization of two? You can't wear that ring for long or it'll rust on your finger."

"Shut up or you'll work yourself into a state," I snap. "You have a talent for ruining things as well, Harry Potter." I stalk towards the hotel and he has to run to catch up.

"You mean you actually would?" he stammers. "After everything I've done to you? Are you insane?"

"That must be it," I shoot back, walking with as much dignity as I can in that muggle outfit.

Then I feel it.

He catches up to where I'm standing. "Severus, you know how I feel."

"Yes, that you wouldn't marry me if I was the last man on earth. I assume that still applies in my present situation. Shut up. Do you feel anything?"

"Other than miserable and confused?"

"Back home. Is anything going wrong with your magical reference?"

"I don't know," he says, suddenly all business. "You're the one that left a body behind. We should go back."

We walk as quickly as we can to gather our purchases from the hotel room and pay the bill before we apparate home.

Where there is a boat tied up to the bay.

_"By her beauty Venus attracts the imperfect metals and gives rise to desire, and pushes them to perfection and ripeness."_

_Basilius Valentinus, 1679_

"Oh, no, Shanti!" I exclaim and fly Harry without asking along with me as I rush to my old campground.

Her mane of dark curls is spread over the sickly looking double laid out before a fire. It looks as though I am on the verge of death—my cheeks are hollow and pale, my chest sunken as a wizard's or witch's chest tends to when it is feeding on its own magic.

She is sobbing with my wrist in her hand. The sensation of watching her interact with what she thinks is my almost-corpse is so surreal that it is Harry that has to gently separate her from the double and point her towards the other me.

"You bastard! You inconsiderate devil!" she is shouting while pounding her fists against my chest.

She recoils taking in the changes to my form, and the sarong and plain blouse I had changed into before we left Hawaii.

"What have you done now?" she asks in a threatening tone that makes Harry and me both take a step back. "What have you been keeping from me this time?"

And I rejoin my other half and tell her through a throat still dry from thirst. Harry is shooting me "I told you so" looks while he brings water and some tonics from my storehouse to tend to my dehydrated body. He's blaming me for not telling Shanti the whole truth, but I'm blaming myself for being so stupid as to think that my other half wouldn't need food or water for so long. How idiotic can I be?

Shanti has a few choice things to say on that subject.

She is absolutely furious that she traveled halfway around the world to be lied to the first time, to sleep with me transfigured again. "And then the ministry contacts me and says your magical signature is dangerously faint. I drop everything in my life to see what is the matter and discover you on your deathbed, only to be surprised by the real you who is now—"

"Don't say it, please," I beg. "I'm not comfortable with it myself."

Harry begins to whisper to her and I faint from weakness.

When I regain consciousness, the two of them are laughing and sharing a drink by the fire. Her eyes turn hard when she sees my eyes are open. "Were you going to tell me at some point the other big news you've been hiding from me?"

In terror I search my mind for some other infraction but come up short.

"That you were getting married?" she supplies.

"That is not even for certain yet," I shoot Harry a look for talking about this completely hypothetical scenario and he seems hurt. "A lot has happened this evening and I, for one, am rather ill. I'm going to sleep."

Shanti sleeps in her boat.

Harry crawls in next to me. "Leave me alone. I'm an idiot." I'm too weak to sit up. "I could have died. Hermés!"

"Please be my idiot, Severus," Harry whispers in my ear.

"Very well," I say and we sleep.

In the morning I am much recovered and we go for our usual early swim, not thinking about what that would mean for Shanti. She is approaching with her strong breaststroke—

"Mon dieu," she says, the reality of my second real body hitting her all over again. I transfigure into Julian and her face relaxes. "I am but a muggle," she says in an exaggerated French manner. "This is too much for me."

Because something in the stars seems to be smiling on us, we spend much of the day creating Shanti's signature. It's harder because her reactions to the test potions are not as strong as Harry's. But we do have his example to work from, and he casts the stones on her behalf, which helps a little. By the time it is time to begin supper they are both exhausted but I am just getting started. They take a break to go check the traps and knock down some coconuts. By the time they have prepared the meal I think I am close.

"Come look, Shanti-ma," I say and they both approach the alembic. "No, that's not right, here," Harry says and makes a crucial few adjustments.

"C'est ça!" she exclaims.

"What?" we say together.

"It is my dream. I have dreamed of this symbol," she says, tracing out the pattern at the largest diameter.

"You've dreamed about this?" Harry asks.

"Many times. It got a little confused in my mind when I woke up, but that's definitely it. I've seen it since I was a girl."

We stare at her in admiration for a few moments.

"What is it?" she finally asks.

"Only that the bulk of occult science has been dedicated to helping people unlock their personal equilibrium, and your own formula has been present in your subconscious since childhood. That's all," I reply.

"Basically, the Minister of Magic should completely revise where he puts muggles in the grand scheme of things," Harry says, stroking Shanti's back.

And over dinner she explains to a rapt audience about her lifetime of dreams and coincidences revolving around this symbol in whole or in part.

For dessert Harry brings out his pipe. "Oh, I don't know," I begin, not sure how to put together these two pieces of my life in light of new developments, but Shanti has already lit the bowl.

We smoke, satisfied at having made more progress in our research. I think of it as truly our research, because both Shanti and Harry have been essential to my progress. I tell them so and I get a kiss on the cheek from each of them.

We get the giggles and laugh about nothing for a while, and then she says suddenly, "You can't marry yourselves, you know."

"What?" I slur. "Who would want to marry himself?"

"Or herself," Harry smiles with eyes slightly crossed.

"I mean that two people need a third person to marry them," she says severely with her hair all askew.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," I begin, tired of all of this talk about something that has never mattered to me.

"Oooh, Shanti-ma," Harry is unsteadily pulling her to her feet. "Will you do the honors?" and he bows and has to grab onto her so he doesn't fall over.

"Why Harry, I would be most delighted," she bows back and this is too bizarre for me.

They're pulling me to my feet and sticking nocturnal lilies in my hair. Harry goes back to get his rodent to be his best man. Some of the birds are woken up by the noise and won't let me rest until they find out what is happening.

Flocks and flocks of birds join us at sunrise, by which time we've all smoked several more herbal preparations and had thoroughly incomprehensible conversations about the most inane vows. As the sun rises I'm mumbling something about Paracelsus while Harry is invoking Dumbledore and Shanti is talking over us in Hindi.

"I now pronounce you Harry and Severus," she shouts into the morning. None of the traditional language quite fit in that regard.

Harry draws out his wand, momentarily sober. "Now swear to me. Swear to me that you'll stay with me forever."

For a moment, I feel the weight of the occasion. We fumble a little to accomplish the traditional gestures without my needing a wand, and then it is done.

We kiss and she takes us both to bed. Me as I am now, Harry, stoned and ecstatic, Shanti, ever the master of the situation, ever the mistress of us both.

She knows more about this new me than I do, and in turn we thank her for everything she has made possible for us.

It was probably the strangest wedding in history.

When we wake up at nightfall we're all very hungover and somewhat embarrassed. "Maybe I shouldn't have—" she begins, either talking about insisting on the marriage or joining us in bed afterwards.

"You should," Harry says and gets up to vomit in the bushes. A few potions help with the hangover but we all withdraw to our own space for the night.

When we wake up, Harry and Shanti begin what becomes a pattern for her visits. They work on art together. She suggests one of her never-ending decorating projects for the structures on his island and then works with Harry to plan the designs his spells will execute. Her vision has always exceeded her ability to execute, so together they make a great pair. Then they turn to his art supplies and paint until their fingers are soaked with pigments and their voices are raw.

This is something Harry has not shared with me the entire time I've been on the island, but I've learned to accept that there are some things he doesn't feel comfortable letting me into. I am relieved that they are gone, however, because I am filed with ideas for my work.

With two magical ideograms to work from I wish I had others, but it seems like it should be enough to find my own signature.

Shanti leaves eventually and I have to force myself to pay attention long enough to say goodbye. For the next two months I find it easier to fit things into place on my alembics, but the outer layer, the macrocosm, still doesn't make any sense to me, no more than the sparking between the individual fireflies orbiting the structure.

Still my own imprint is as elusive as ever.

Harry prepares all my meals and watches me to make sure I eat them. He sets requirements—the morning swim is a must, as is the walk before bed. I may stay up working two non-consecutive nights during the week if I take an entire day off at some point.

"Yes, yes," I say, caught up in discovering new potions—one that is an excellent sunscreen that even Harry will use, a better dentifrice, a lotion for our sand-baked soles of our feet, something that strikes me would be good for lung ailments though we have no need of such things, a mental clarifier that only works for five minutes at a time but which Harry agrees helps him solve the most stubborn engineering problems he has. And perhaps most significantly, a potion that makes us unpalatable to most of the many biting insects, not all of which can I communicate with well enough to persuade them to leave us alone.

Eating lunch mechanically with my mind on all these problems, he catches my chin in his hand. "Don't make me," he says.

"Of course," I agree, having no idea what he's talking about.

He hides the alembic one day a week.

The birds help him, apparently.

Once he has my full attention I am ashamed that I have neglected him so much.

"Remember this?" he murmurs.

"And this?"

Our memories have never tasted so sweet.

"I'm so glad it's just us," he breathes into my hair. "Shanti understands that we'll only be with her if it's the three of us," he says, and I am surprised at this. We've not discussed what his expanded sexuality might mean for him, but they get along so well I had assumed they did something other than art on his island. "Only if you want to," he says with the new shyness that makes his eyes look away from mine.

His tentativeness is irresistible.

We do nothing else but exist in a state of quiet discovery for some indefinite length of time

In the middle of the night, while Harry sleeps a calm sleep without the aid of potions beside me, I return to my writings.

They have been a way of marking time, and ordering a mind with a tendency to slip, during these years of exile.

One wakeful night runs into the next for me, until it seems like the story I'm writing is the only light that has ever shined on my life, and the rest of it has been half-formed dreams. So I cannot say which night everything became clear, because the clarity seems all of a piece.

My notes began all that time ago with the idea that I could use them to help trace patterns in Harry's health that would help me find a cure. Instead, I can look back and begin to trace a vein in myself that I wasn't aware of until it was too late. Which may have spared me from being the witness to yet another piece of my fate, the final piece, assembling beyond my control.

The change has already gone too far, Rukmini. It is you to whom I've been directing these scribblings all this time, and to you I offer the few things I have managed to put together and the many things that will never be assembled into any meaningful whole.

Rukmini, my stranger-friend, I don't want to have to know what finally wakes you—will it be my potion or my cautionary tale? Or will it be merely your time?

But I know you will wake. Just as I know that Shanti will keep coming to visit Harry. Maybe she will even live here. And she will only seldom row over to my island and watch the alembics disintegrate in the salt air. She and Harry will be making things. Maybe they will make a child. There's no reason why they shouldn't. It all depends on whether he can see that or not. That whatever his aberrations, they are not in the flesh.

I've sampled his hair, his skin, his nails and every other physical remnant and from all of these I can force a reveal that shows his true nature as good. His magical signature doesn't bear that dark spot that always showed up in his divination readings, which I always assumed was his gall bladder ailment and only too late came to understand was a kernel of Voldemort's dormant presence.

When he poises on the rock above the water and dives in, I see the young man with the brave heart I began to love so long ago. There is still hope for him. Especially after I'm gone. It turns out that I was not the one that kept his demons at bay. It was the idea that he could escape them. All of his plans include darkness now. As the best laid plans do.

For me, from my remotest germinations I was toxic to my mother. Harry was only incidental to his mother's death. He hadn't already wormed his way into her being and undone her will so that she didn't even have a chance to choose.


	69. Chapter 69

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 69: The Last Arcanum

Time ceases to mean anything for us in our idyll. Pieces of the past and present, all the versions of ourselves and our fates, swirl before my eyes in a gentler version of themselves, and I have a hard time keeping track in a linear fashion. But Harry wakes one morning and decides to go to one of the nearby islands for art supplies. We're relatively sure that his magical charm will stand in for him well enough, but I urge him not to be gone very long just in case. Finding out that the Ministry is indeed keeping track of how many of us are on the island was an unpleasant reminder that we are prisoners. I force him to bring Polyjuice and to transform himself into the first person whose hair he can steal on the very slight chance someone in Asia knows who Harry Potter is.

When he appears several days later I don't notice at first how long it took him. When I make my calculations my heart turns to lead.

"I was sketching," he says quietly, and my suspicions are dispelled when he shows me his new sketchbook.

Some of the ideas are similar to the ones he once shared with Tristan—making animate paintings like wizard photographs but with the special sensibility Harry's talent lends to any image he creates. He's tending towards a more abstract style these days, and though at first I hated to see him abandon his splendid realism, I must admit that the conceptual element does act to heighten the subject at hand very much like a sigil. It's almost wholly unexplored territory, and the sketches are in the form of a flipbook showing the type of movement he wants to create.

"I figured you were working too, so you'd understand," he says and I nod, trying to place something about the images.

"Yes, it's right there." He traces his finger over the top of a gull's head, a rocky cliff, a dip in the horizon, a rusting pier, a gleam of sun on the water. "I didn't put it there consciously, but once I noticed the magical signature I found it appearing in everything I drew."

I squint my eyes and move the picture forwards and backwards. "That might be what makes it obviously a Harry drawing," I suggest. "I could pick it out of a thousand similar seascapes, but would never have been able to tell you why. Except maybe that orange-blue right there seems typical of you somehow."

"I was also waiting for these," Harry says with a touch of nerves in his voice. He takes the fish vertebrae we've been wearing on our first fingers and puts on the custom-made rings with a simplified version of his symbol on it. Thankfully he understood that giving the entire signature to someone would be suicidal. "That space is for yours when you find it," he says.

How old am I now? The numbers have stopped meaning anything ever since the huge influx of magic in my late thirties started sending the clock backwards.

It's just childish, ridiculous to have two bits of metal mean something. But they do.

After Harry is asleep that night I quietly slip away and fly up to my perch where I've built an alembic he can't hide. All of the potions and rocks and things are there, and several colonies of beetles for magical testing as well. I mix a simple potion—a headache salve—something that lets my hands work while I let my mind drift. Many weeks of experimentation have showed me that a frontal assault on the problem is yielding progress on everything but the matter of my signature. The salve calls an active yellow substance—it used to be an Imp-wing worm but here it's the Butterfly-Lizard's tail. But the unfamiliar look of the ring catches the corner of my eye and makes me cut my finger, something I haven't done while making potions since I was eight.

A drop of the blood gets in the cauldron and the liquid turns to gold.

"Por le Ancien et Mystique Ordre de la Rose-Croix!"

I stare at the liquid gold for many horror-stricken minutes before I get the courage to bring my hand to the cauldron and test the magical properties.

Gold is one of the basic magical substances—one of the original Paracelsan test materials. My mother kept a small piece to test some of her potions, like a tuning fork.

It's clearly gold. It's purer than my ring, in fact. It would have to be—pure gold is too malleable to stay in a ring form.

"Thank Hermés I'm banished to the end of the earth," is the only thought bouncing around my suddenly empty mind.

There are fates worse than death.

I should know.

Every wizard child has heard the story about the Too-Pure Potion, as I did from my grandmother. I clearly remember sitting in her drawing room having tea. She was punishing me for doing something too well, I don't remember what. Chances are I cast one of the spells from her library with amazing dexterity for a child and she was trying to warn me the dangers talented conjurers face (she herself had been cursed for her skill many times by rivals and perhaps ended up dying from such a fate). Or I did too well at lessons, or she might have been admonishing me for being too invested in caring for my mother.

Grand-mére was full of these bizarre ideas that made visits to her house unpredictable at best. On this occasion in her parlor Adele and Veronica were there, and Grand-mére spoke French down her regal nose to the rest of our clumsy features.

"Severus, I can see that you do not know the story of the Perilously Pure Potion," she began. Veronica snorted at yet another basic thing I didn't know about the wizarding world. She mouthed the word "Mudblood" so that Grand-mére couldn't see. Adele merely smiled in that way that made you wish she wouldn't.

"Abelard was a merchant wizard. He traveled all over the world collecting strange and exotic magical items and trading them—very sagely, too, until he was a rich man.

"But being rich has never mattered that much among wizards. Those who are willing to dedicate themselves to such pastimes can craft a very passable coin or bill that will fool any muggle, and sometimes a wizard or witch."

Adele snorted at this point. For the rest of her life Grand-mére was required to pay in advance at the shops in Diagon Alley because some of her money "disappeared" once, hours after she left it. She was later able to prove she'd been working for Gringott the Younger himself, in order to point out the need for better security measures to protect the British wizarding currency from a rash of counterfeiting. Nevertheless, many magical shops kept an eye on her money for hours before they allowed her to spend it in their establishment.

My grandmother was sipping her tea and nibbling on a biscuit. They were her own conjured recipe—she was the rare person who could conjure tasty and nutritious food as long as you ate it quickly. These had bits of candied ginger and shaved vanilla pod on top and they were exquisite. I always stole some while I was there but only rarely got one home before it turned to dust.

"Abelard was greedy," Veronica supplied, letting me know that she had seen me take the sweets. "He got what was coming to him."

"Abelard was needy," Aunt Adele drawled, letting me know what she thought of my attempts to curry favor with her. "He would never have gone far."

"Abelard was a man," Grandmere said, stroking my hair the way she had to make me sit up straighter. "Like all men he wanted things he didn't understand and didn't know what to do with them when he had them."

"What did he want?" I was scarcely able to ask. As the only male at the table I couldn't help but feel I was being scrutinized.

"He wanted the ultimate love potion," my grandmother said and both Adele and Veronica looked superior, neither of them having known love. "Some say it was because such a compound would always have a market because there are some who would have love at any cost. Others say he had been spurned in love himself. Everyone agrees that once apothecary after apothecary refused to sell it to him in the bazaars and markets of the world, his curiosity was aroused and he had to find some.

"Finally, somewhere near Bangkok he found such a person, a wizened old woman who was that rare and dangerous creature—a potions adept with no scruples at all.

"Does your mother keep bituminate of silver or petrified Savory Bee in her storeroom?" my grandmother suddenly asked me.

I shook my head, embarrassed that grand-mére still thinks of them as mother's supplies when I've been the only one using them for years.

"How about Serrated Oliveleaf or Russian Honeydew?" I shook my head again.

"Your mother could prepare a potion that would make a wizard or witch stronger than the most powerful dragon. She could render a woman—or perhaps even a man—able to bear a fully formed child overnight and without pain. Eugenie could make an old person return the blossom of their youth, at least for a time. She could, in short, control the rulers of the world by influencing them to her will, simply by wafting a certain mist in the vents of their staterooms."

Having never known my mother as anything other than sickly, this amazed and delighted me. "She could? Has she done these things? Why did you never tell me?"

"Eugenie would never do anything so wicked," her sister said as if that were the root of the problem that made her drool frequently.

"Adepts at the Invisible School take an oath, one that makes the Unbreakable Vow look like child's play," Grand-mére continued. "Once they swear to never misuse their gifts, they are taught many wonderful and terrible things. The great adepts know how much good to do at any given time without causing harm. And then the School releases them into the world to become Invisible—doing as much good as they can without anyone really noticing. Because all they will have done is bring something that was slightly out of balance into balance."

My eyes widened with a new understanding of the import of our science. "Like a cooling potion for a fever?"

"Yes, child, exactly like that," and I craned up at her hoping for praise, but her brow was furrowed.

"What do you want most in the world?" the old woman asked. Of course I wanted to become a great potion master to make my mother well, but I couldn't talk about her infirmity. It was too overwhelming.

"Whatever it is, give up on it. Whatever you desire, tear off a small piece of it to keep and throw the rest away," my grandmother snapped.

"I don't understand. Weren't you telling the story of Abelard and the Too-Pure Potion?" My tea had grown cold. I thought one of the biscuits in my pocket might have disintegrated. "Did the witch in Bangkok make the potion?"

"Oh, yes, she had taken no such oath as your mother did. She would make anything for a price. The old witch didn't show Abelard the dangers of the potion—perhaps if she'd shown him a fly being torn into bits by his fellow flies, or a cat being used to death—"

"How do you use a cat to death?" Veronica asked the question that was also in my mind, but Adele smited us both with her hands across the table.

Grand-mére was nothing if not a genius at ignoring things, so she resumed the tale. "Then maybe our curious merchant would have left his foolish quest in Bangkok and returned to England as the same man that left it.

"Instead, he paid a small fortune for one phial. She said she only had the means to make one, but maybe she had some professional ethics after all. I shudder to think what would have happened if such a compound got into a water supply."

"What happened?" I can't take the suspense any longer.

"There was a storm at sea when Abelard was returning with his goods. During the hubbub the phial, which he was so worried about losing that he kept it in a pocket close to his heart, broke and sunk into his skin while he was bailing out the hull with the other men."

Here Grand-mére paused delicately.

"The other men suddenly thought he was so—appealing—he was ripped apart in the process," Adele took up the thread but didn't specify which process. My childish mind knew it must be something ghastly, because usually she didn't spare Veronica's and my feelings. "The captain and first mate were the only ones on deck, and they were battling so hard to keep the ship righted they didn't notice until the craft had taken so much water it was listing far to the side.

"They went down and found only bits where there had been men. Just surveying the grisly soup made up of their companions and seawater suddenly gripped them with an overpowering sensation. Holding their hands over each other's eyes they stumbled up on deck and tore off a large board and lashed themselves to it. When the waves came to swallow the ship, they floated their way to shore and told their tale."

Aunt Adele fell silent and Veronica and I shared a shiver.

"What they told of the ill-starred Abelard has been passed down through the ages, to this very day," Grandmere picked up the tale again and looked around the room.

I could feel the hair prickling on the back of my neck by the end of all grandmother's stories, and I looked forward to the nightmares brought on by talented storytellers such as she.

"They told of a man who was a little too much of something—a little too likable, a little too curious, a little too crafty. And the potion he wished to let loose in the markets of the world was too pure for any wizard or witch to handle just a drop. It would have been the ruin of our civilization. And then they told how he was torn apart because of it, because of his fellows wanting a piece of anything stained by this fatal concoction. And this end was a mercy. He could have destroyed a whole city made to fight over the person who absorbed any of the stuff. In short, Abelard could have been king of the world, for a time, until that same world feasted upon him."

She paused, looking intently at Veronica and me before saying with her impeccable delivery, "Finally, these sailors told of that grisly, bloody soup, which had some of that infernal potion mixed in with it, becoming one with the sea. And that, children, is why they say that everyone feels a siren call near the ocean, a call from something irresistible and deadly, just hinted at in the deep."

She sat back and conjured another pot of honeybracken tea.

"Why do you always tell that bit at the end!" Adele protested. "You can talk to sirens, you've met a few and say yourself they're not very interesting."

"That's the way the tale was told," Grand-mére said placidly in the way that I knew enraged Adele, who started to make those knitting motions with her hands. "My grandmother told it to me, and her grandmother told it to her just like that. Who am I to change it after all this time?"

"The moral of the story is, don't be too much of anything," Veronica recited. "Be a little of a lot of things, that's what my parents tell me." She paused. "But I guess you don't have to worry about that, Halfblood."

"Yes, most likely he doesn't," my grandmother agreed, and for once I felt very grateful for the mixed background that was usually not brought up at her house. She handed me another biscuit.

Sitting up in my perch at the top of my island, I can almost taste the biscuits again and wish I'd learned grand-mére's arts. Flour, sugar and chicken eggs are obviously not available anywhere but on the mainland, and I miss European baked goods at times. The memory crumbles on my tongue as the thought comes to me, as it did so many times as a teenager, that perhaps all of the trouble with my irresistible True Face arose because in some way I wanted to be loved too much, and I "got what was coming to me" as Veronica would say.

And so this latest feat that even those at the Invisible School won't admit to knowing, the art of turning nothing into gold that could make people tear me limb from limb to learn, to possess—

This grand occasion is succinctly noted in my laboratory log.

_September 15,_

_Learned what the Philosopher's Stone is._

_How utterly humiliating._

Harry is deeply immersed in his art projects so he is naturally very supportive when I tell him I want to project my other body to the mainland in search of some alchemical texts.

"Don't be gone long, love. I need you whole and healthy with me."

"Of course. I know exactly what I'm looking for, and if they don't have it in Asia I'll send a bird for it."

But when I leave this time, there is only a dry husk left, the barest of illusions. The rest of me, the essence of me, began to crystallize into some invisible body that is different than the slice of me that used to navigate the Dream-floo or apparate around the world. I've been getting the hang of using it for some time, spending many a night ostensibly in Harry's arms while I was walking around all the countries on earth. No one, not even the wisest shaman or shamaness can sense this version of me that must be pure awareness, divorced from magic or personality.

On these excursions I have enjoyed the sensation that I have at last left my Alkahest nature behind.

But I have always returned quickly from these sojourns with no purpose. This time I have the overwhelming urge to see To'an because of how stupid I feel about discovering the Philosopher's Stone.

"I can just picture him now," I wrote to Rukmini shortly after that event. "He and that kestrel of his are splitting their sides over it all: 'Did you hear the one about that fool Dragon-spirit who was trying to be a man? He stumbled upon the Philosopher's Stone by dumb luck—He doesn't even know what he did!" "He calls himself a scientist and he can't begin to replicate his results?"

When I have left Harry behind I hover imperceptibly in the Vietnamese sage's cave and find he is indeed doubled over in laughter with his bird friend, but they're merely commenting upon the latest bird gossip. I had assumed that accomplishing the near-impossible would reverberate on the dream-floo network these shamans are so skilled at maneuvering, but it's apparently just another day in the mountains of France.

Then I visit Nnunu, the medicine woman who introduced me to Mick. She is in the middle of helping a child into the world. No matter how deeply I listen to her thoughts, she is only concentrating on this woman and this birth.

Over the next day I revisit many of the men and women healers I met during my travels. They all seem like ordinary people who happen to have many more abilities and much more knowledge than most. Lessmore would say that it's my own fault for falling prey to this trap they set for the unsuspecting: thinking that these shamans and soothsayers are these larger-than-life figures.

It hurts me, this knowledge that is not really knowledge, flowing in my veins and staining my tissues. Such good this small group of responsible adepts could do if I could impart the secret to manufacturing the Stone! They wouldn't rest at making wealth or flitting about the globe in a new invisible body. They'd know how to administer the immense power that is stillborn in my hands because I can't for the life of me figure out how or even when it came about.

Frustrated, I assume my new true form—the form that married Harry—and buy translations of all of Paracelsus' works.

When I return after being gone a day and a half, Harry is still where I left him, surrounded by his art.

"Eat it before it melts," I admonish him, and finally he looks up at me and sees the ice cream I brought back for him.

"Sev, this is heavenly," he says in a pause from licking the rapidly melting dessert. "Did you find your books?"

The shrunken volumes keep coming out of my bag until I find the bag of shrimp crisps that Harry developed a taste for in one of his Asian trips.

"Merlin, Severus, I guess you won't need to go ashore for a while," he observes, surveying my acquisitions. "Promise me you'll sit with me sometimes while you do your reading? Otherwise I'm afraid I won't see you for months."

This is one time that I would do anything for some privacy in which to curse and scream at the pages that tell me less than nothing, as always. But I force myself to sit next to Harry and his projects while I quietly rage at the Great Physick:

"_Tinctura, the last arcanum, is like the rebis—the bisexual creature—which transmutes silver and other metals into gold; it "tinges," ie, it transforms the body, removing its harmful parts, its crudity, its incompleteness, and transforms everything into a pure, noble, and indestructible being."_

Of course I've heard of the Divine Hermaphrodite: every schoolchild has seen the many woodcuts and engravings depicting the half-male, half-female being that is the result of all the many labors required of the alchemist. But for one, I'm far from divine, and for another thing, who would have thought that they meant a literal transformation into some middling creature such as I am now?

It simply never occurred to me all those months ago when the rock I had thought my body to be began to soften and change. Why should it? That would mean that one should literally reproduce all of the ridiculous and patently misleading instructions in Paracelsus' works. Out of spite, I also brought back from my trip some of these ingredients to prove a point.

_Pour it over linseed oil, place it in an iron pan, and let it boil… Put the particles into which it is divided into an iron pan with laterine oil and oil it thoroughly for two hours. Afterwards place it in a glass vessel on ashes for three days. Then the sulphur is converted into an oil. Take the glass vessel again and put it in cold water for three days and three nights. Then distill it, first of all over a slow fire, but increasing the heat until it is sufficient. Thoroughly calcine the dregs, which are called the caput mortuum. Imbibe with the first water. Then distil for seven hours. Do this again until the redness of the oil is changed to white, which will take place in three hours. Finally, take again the aforesaid oil; distill it by itself for seven hours, and the process is complete._

_Then take a plate of Venus and dip it in the said oil. If it is transmuted into Luna, well and good. If not…_

Suffice it to say that the result of these experiments always fell under the "if not." Say what you will about my grasp of the scientific method, a lifetime of sensing potions had already told me that all of these instructions, taken literally, were to no purpose.

My hand banishes the brew, and with it, all these ridiculous chemicals I had acquired to retrace the steps of l'Hermès allemand, as my mother called him. Could it be that the author of modern potions science did indeed produce the Philosopher's Stone, but like me, he had no idea what he did? It's not possible that all of his writing is one elaborate charade intended to cover over this ignorance with a baroque pseudo-science. There are many truths in his works.

But if there are any answers to my present questions, they are lost to the ages.

"Rest now, my uncle," I say while tossing the volumes one by one into the sea. This is the only funeral I've ever attended for one who I considered family. It may be my misty eyes, but it looks as though the books are leaping around like flying fish, silver in the early morning sun, for some minutes before going to their eternal rest.

By the time I've composed myself and flown back to wake up Harry, it's all locked in some place where even the deep sympathy he and I have developed can't discover it.

"Good morning," I kiss him awake and he smiles.

I go back to living by his side, confident that nothing will get in the way of our harmonious way of life.

Shanti returns some months later. We do have one evening with the three of us, but mostly she is twinkling at me while I perform mundane actions like making dinner.

"I'm glad you've finally found a way to be yourself with people," she says fondly while combing my hair. "You're much lighter without hiding so many things inside."

I smile my new smile, the one that has the power to silence and distract and make people smile back. This is the power that no body of mine ever had before: confidence. What one is confident of turns out not to matter very much. My appearance must be much more harmonious than I feel about it, because Shanti, more than anyone, has never been so easy to dazzle. I interrupt the combing to stir the soup.

She and Harry spend much of her visit together, working on art projects while they give me space to work on my island.

I let them think that is what I am doing.

But it is finished.

What I will be able to do, at least.

When she hugs us both goodbye I am not sad. It is the same ocean that connects the whole world, after all.

"You attract good people into your life, Sev," Harry says as we watch her boat lose itself in the distance.

"That's a wonderful thing to say," I pull his arm around me and we go for a walk in the surf. "Tell me more about the hybrids you're working on in that coldhouse of yours." And I watch him gesticulate and plan and draw schematics in the air with his wand. This gifted man whose mind seems able to solve the most impossible problems given enough time and space and peace to work on it. Harry's finally figured out an at least partial solution to our record-keeping problems. He's made a charm that can extract text from all our moldering bits of paper, leaf and bark, and store them seemingly in nothingness, and then call them forth and imprint them on whatever is handy.

This broadchested man with arms and legs muscled from shimmying up fruit trees, shorter than I, but much more threatening-looking in a dark alley than I ever was, and certainly more than I ever will be again. These hands that make wonderful art, these hands that have killed. No law has sanctioned our union, but no one could ever deny that we are two scoopfuls of the same potion. My prison and my freedom.

"Harry." I say and then can say nothing more. He nods, having grown accustomed to my silences and pauses in the face of our harmony in recent months, and begins one of his amazing sand sculptures.

"Severus," he says to recall my attention from listening to the Babel of sounds that is coming to me more clearly with each passing day from the ocean. He casts a little animating spell on this figure rising out of the sand like the bust on an old galleon's prow. The animation makes it toss its hair over its shoulder the way I have been doing since I was a child. It curls its upper lip despectively, very much like Adele, and then it smiles in a way that makes me want to smile back.

"You must be joking," I say, "Adele never looked so good."

"It's not your aunt," and his voice is full of fondness.

I run out into the ocean to swim and calm myself awhile. I don't want to be anyone anymore. After so many different forms, all of them seem so random. I don't want him to love this one or any of the others. I want him to love me. The me that is beyond all accidents of form.

When I come back and tell him as much, he's scratching his engineering plans in the sand.

"I don't understand you, Severus. You say you can see your body when you rejoin it after astral projection, or when you're coming out of a trance. Why can't you recognize that person as yourself?"

"All I see is a doorway shaped like some poor devil that I know is the way towards home. Perhaps I had a stroke at some point. There have been other cases like mine."

"I don't think either devil or angel would capture you very well, but there's nothing poor about you," Harry says, dropping the stick. and his hand does that magic that empties my mind entirely.

He carries me to a peace that is both new and old. When the waves of pleasure abate and we are washed back up on the shore he points out a freckle here, a birthmark there, a characteristic gesture, that are all me, the me I have always been.

"Your waist never got quite back to normal after wearing that corset for so long," he says, drawing me close by that part.

Always the same, always changing.

These several days after Shanti's visit we are busy planting the seedlings she brought. Harry is searching for hardier, heat-seeking varieties that he can splice with the cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce in the coldhouse. A combination of magical and muggle technology such as only an exiled wizard with a craving for English salad could have made.

"You're a genius," I say and enumerate all of the inventions that would never have occurred to me. He needs some more supplies from the mainland so he plans on going ashore tomorrow.

The sky is so close I can feel its dark breath on my neck.

We make love in our tiny outpost at the end of the universe, turning each each other over and over like the alembic until we find the pattern on the widest of our joined circumference.

Then all is gold for a long time. Especially on that final night.


	70. Chapter 70

The Pelican's Bequest 3 / Chapter 12: Destinies

_This thing itself presently comes forth stronger by reasons of this fortitude: it subdues all bodies surely, whether tenuous or solid, by penetrating them. (Kriegsmann)_

_This is the power of all strength- it overcomes that which is delicate and penetrates through solids. (Idres Shah)_

_Two translations of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, line 10_

Severus Jacques Theophrastus…" Harry's sleepy voice says, as if memorizing a very important clue to a mystery he is sure will appear on the other side of dreams, but he falls asleep before he can say the rest.

"Harry James Potter, forgive me," I say to the head I watch sleep all night long.

When the sun comes up he pulls me out of my cramped posture for the morning swim before his journey.

"No love, I'm tired. My mind was occupied with a new potion all last night and it kept me up. Have a pleasant trip and be safe,"

"I'll bring you back something nice," he promises.

I turn into a bird and watch him bathe from afar, his body gleaming with the combination of sun and water.

All this time I've been hiding it so well with spells and glamours, what even my potions couldn't stop, but I can't hold back the inevitable forever.

It would have been cruel to die right in front of him this morning.

Once he is gone I assume my true form. The one that has been changing slowly, on a deeper level yet than the gender disturbances that have wracked my self-concept. For a very long time, since I can't say when, I noticed the small sand-crabs and sea-lice were always getting into my clothes. Then again, Harry is bothered much more than I by the stinging Bottle-nosed Flies. With spells and potions I was able to control the problem and forget about it. But at some point in the last six months this mild annoyance has revealed itself to be part of a larger tide creeping slowly over me.

I've been drifting off wherever I am, dreaming while awake, of the sea. This is not my catatonia—unlike there, I am not alone. Far from it: I can just catch the language of some of the fish, but it is the language of the deep, the whales and monstrous octopi and many-hundred-yard-long eels. This is the language I long to know, have always wanted to know but sensed I would pay some price for the knowledge.

At first the pull to the ocean I blamed on myself for indulging in too much bathing, because that's all I really have wanted to do for months. No matter what else I was doing, there was a thought in some tiny corner of my brain that soon it would be over and I could immerse myself again. I thought it was to hide from my body. While one part of my mind has been clearer than ever, another has been struggling to concentrate, feeling myself become like water during work, during love, and at night dreaming, dreaming of the ocean.

I put my hands to my un-glamoured face. There are tiny sea creatures squirming in there like the other Alkahest who so horrified me and Harry. I realized at some point that it was not because she was mad or suicidal that she was dissolving into the ocean.

It was because she was female.

If only my other transformation hadn't happened! If I had stayed safely a male, I have every reason to believe that Harry and I could have died of old age together. Who can fathom which thing it was that made me drift halfway away from one gender without ever reaching the other? It must be something in the Macrocosm, whether it was the weather patterns here, or being surrounded by the salt air and the water, or some ill wind, or what have you. Some spark between the outer and inner layers of my world propelled me to this place stranded halfway between the genders.

Paracelsus would say that as an Alkahest, all my potions were really taking place in the alembic that is me, literally me. So that all my questing to understand the world only transformed one bit of it—myself. It's a reductionism that makes me want to beat my head against a rock, but I don't want to turn anything to gold and upset the ecosystem.

It's been me all along. Unlovely me. Once I fit my hand into the alembic it was complete. There was a burst of light and there were diamonds in the rock of the cave. That I myself create the ultimate potion becomes clear. I am the Stone.

Would it have worked with my flesh all those years ago, when I was experimenting with Lessmore? Probably not. I was confused, bitter. Impure. I'd not had my Chymical Wedding, which was either my union with Harry or with myself. By all rights the farther I've traveled from the male end of the spectrum, the more clear-headed I've become. But apparently everything comes with a price.

Nonetheless, once partially female, the destiny that is reserved for females of the Belacqua line could claim me at last.

A few weeks ago I was doing my nightly checking via the dream network to see how the people I left behind were doing. Mostly I look in on Shanti and Andre, but on this night I suddenly realized Adele's unmistakable magical signature was no longer there. It wasn't anywhere.

I considered taking a trip with my new invisible body to Europe, but our next Ministry shipment was due that day anyway. With our supply requests I included a letter asking about Adele's health.

To my surprise, a letter apparated through the wards on our island and was waiting for me, encapsulated in a corked and sealed container, when we went out for our morning swim three days later.

"The ministry takes family very seriously," Harry reminded me. "Family and debts. Probably my parent's death coupled with my supposedly killing Voldemort single-handedly is what kept them from locking me in Azkaban."

My eyes on the letter, I frowned.

"Nobody can resist your bargaining skills, of course, Sev," he said to mollify what he thought was an insult, but the contents of the letter had all the blood draining out of my face. "Is it bad news?" he asked.

"The worst," I replied, not elaborating on the news clippings and the official letter.

_Dear Mr. Snape,_

_The Ministry wishes to convey our sincerest condolences for the loss of your Aunt, Adele Berthe Victoire Velasquez Belacqua Laurent. We would certainly have notified you immediately if we had realized the woman who escaped from Erstwhile Pickerell Asylum was indeed your close relation._

_As it was, if you had not pursued the matter, she would have sadly remained an unsolved case. Since you have proven that giving closure to family members is one of your principles, so it would have been unjust for us to let your dear aunt simply vanish without getting to the bottom of the matter._

"Are they complimenting you?" Harry was shocked.

"I rather think their automatic ministry condolence-quill is programmed to be as obsequious with everyone, no matter how many people they've killed," I said drily. "Keep reading."

_It is thus that no expense was spared in this difficult investigation, made all the more difficult by the fact that some unscrupulous individual gave your dear demented aunt access to a Restricted Potion. The Polyjuice was what enabled her to slip out of the safety of her ward disguised as a nurse who was later found Petrified in a closet. How an elderly woman did such a thing without a wand we will never understand—"_

"If she's related to you, I'm surprised she didn't do worse," Harry chortled and then I was giving him a look. "It appears that the Polyjuice was not very potent," he continued reading.

"It was the best in the world," I snarled. "We have a congenitally high tolerance for it."

_"Because an old woman matching your aunt's rather distinctive profile was sighted getting onto a train in York. And she must have traveled by coach once she reached Dover, because in the tills of certain bus fare collectors we found worthless bits of paper and metal which had doubtless been charmed to act as currency for long enough to assure her a passage on her final destination_."

"My grandmother would have been proud," I interjected, and told him the story of Gringott's.

_We can only guess at what made her decide to travel so many miles to take her own life, when even the best-run asylum offers countless ways of ending one's days, but the truth is that your beloved aunt traveled some three hundred miles to reach her birthplace and threw herself into the sea._

_It just so happens that some muggle tourists saw an elderly woman jump from a rock into the cold water. The man jumped in to save her, but her head never reappeared above water. It was as though she was swallowed by the waves."_

"The ministry should really adjust its quills," Harry complained, seeing my upset and getting annoyed himself at the melodramatic letter. "She must have been mad after all, Severus," he said gently, stroking my arm. "You gave her the Polyjuice because you thought she was sane and didn't want to see her end her days in an asylum for no reason. You thought it was the right thing to do."

I nodded, my heart beating sluggishly in my chest. "Look at the other document. It seems that Veronica, who is only a second cousin, did her best to fight it, but I've inherited my grandmother's seaside house. My mother's childhood home."

"That's wonderful, Severus!" Harry exclaimed, though we'd be killed on sight should we set foot in the place. He just likes to feel that there's a tiny square of England where we belong. "I'm sorry about your aunt. She was the last close family you had left and that has to mean something."

"It does," I murmured, feeling as though a Fragmented parchment whose pieces had been floating around for a long time waiting for me finally had come together into a clear message just for my eyes.

Adele knew. The old bitch knew and she didn't tell me. I was absolutely furious with her for keeping one more important thing from me. The fact that I was securely a male then and thus not seemingly in line for the Belacqua women's curse didn't matter.

Only at that moment with the useless property bequest in hand did I realize that all the women in my grandmother's line, unless they died young of childbirth or violence or accident, found their natural death in a body of water. My great-great grandmother had famously died while wrestling an octopus on a dare. She was gifted with some sort of amazing strength, but also cursed with pride, and so when someone bet her that she couldn't best this enormous octopus known to live in a certain cove, she couldn't resist.

Then there was my great-aunt Dominique. A tidal wave reached her on the shores of Madagascar, where she was on a botany expedition. Formidable women, the Belacquas, always superior to the men of that stripe, if a bit likely to take chances.

I could go on. Another great-aunt, a musician, fell off a boat while composing a song to the moon while drunk, exactly like Li Po. My great-grandmother was, like her daughter, my grandmother, a gifted conjurer, and she died what seemed like a typical death for her profession. One of the minute animated sugar cakes that she had conjured to dance in time was poisoned by one of her competitors. It is traditional for the conjurer to sample one of her wares to show that is indeed edible. She fed herself the poisoned sweet and was found a short time later with her head in the wondrous fountain she'd created as the archway for the bride and groom to walk through.

When I heard the story, it impressed me with how daring my grandmother's profession was. Until I found out about Adele it didn't occur to me that her dying act was to seek out any amount of water to fulfill the destiny she had always carried in her blood.

When I asked my aunt about my grandmother's death, she didn't want to talk about it because that's what made her put all the family stories together. The fact that my mother's ashes finally ended up in the sea helped prove her suspicion. She didn't avoid talking about their deaths out of love. Adele had locked herself away in a madhouse to escape the increasing desire to fling herself into the ocean. My gift of Polyjuice had been the gift to give in to her destiny at last.

At least she didn't drown herself in the bathroom at Erstwhile Pickerell, I tried to comfort myself. Perhaps she is finally at peace. I thought she must be because her reflection seems a little less gargoyle-like than before.

Harry let me walk for long hours at the edge of the water, but I was mourning for something other than my aunt. I was thinking it might not be so terrible to dissolve in the deep. I've only managed to put it off for so long because I'm terrified of what awaits me there. But like it or not, the sea is coming to me.

Beneath the form that Harry has come to love, I must endure the torment of all the small sea creatures, the small crabs and also some urchins and live sea-plants, that squirm and wriggle in what used to be my skin.

Many times in my lifetime I have wished to know what other Alkahests have suffered, as if it would make my own tribulations less. But I have also wished for others so I could have a decent sample size for experimentation. Cold-blooded? Perhaps. But then I could finally separate my condition from my family's genetic mutations, if indeed they are separate.

All of the women in my family are extraordinary. Adele and I, unfortunately, seem to share the most characteristics, such as the gift with languages, the ability to enter another's mind easily, the immunity to Polyjuice and generally idiosyncratic constitution, the hand magic, as well as the worst of our family's physiognomy. Then again, mine is a family full of unusual traits.

The doctor who sent me to Hogwarts recognized this and theorized that others like my Aunt had a mild case compared to my full-blown abnormality, which might explain why my grandmother and aunt never felt any ill effects from proximity to me. My mother's carrying and giving birth to an Alkahest probably negated any natural protection she may have possessed. One explanation is that what manifests in most of my female relations is the uncontrollable desire to become one with the sea is in me the tendency to become one with anything magical.

Or maybe I was already being seduced by the lure of the ocean and this new body was the first step of coming apart. No matter.

Whether it's one desire or two that has me squirming with crabs and dreaming of throwing myself in the ocean, there is no escape.

In Harry's arms, where I have escaped from so much before. I have scarcely been there for my lover for weeks, I've been flowing through his fingers like water, but he's been too happy to notice. Sure that I am finally his to keep.

The hardest thing was to seek out that revolting little rodent of his and transfer the Unbreakable Vow I took on our wedding night to this loathsome pseudo-marsupial.

"Do you understand what will happen if you try to abandon him, no matter if he leaves the island or not?" I ask again. As much as I despise the thing, there are certain fates I wouldn't wish on anyone.

"Of course I understand. You're leaving him at last," the smelly creature simpers and chatters at me.

"Soon, yes. Until then, I'd thank you to stay out of the way."

What will happen to Harry without me? It is a terrifying question, considering the past, but he can't watch me disintegrate before his eyes, either.

And the sirens. The sirens talk to me in the depths of my mind.

_Severus, child. We've been waiting for you._

"Who do you mean?" I ask, resigned that hearing voices is the final flourish on my madness.

_Hercula, Adele, Eugenie and many others of your line are waiting for you._

This last name shakes me to my disintegrating core. It impels one last effort to expel the sea-life that has taken root in me. But it is useless. I don't recognize my thoughts, my inner landscape—everything is getting away from me the way water tends to do. No one is the master of the ocean. It's a conglomeration of chaos that doesn't even recognize itself.

I will belong there.

Finally.

It might be a comfort if I wasn't terrified to meet my mother, if the voices in my head can be trusted. What will I say to her? It's different than talking to Rukmini as her, as I did in far-off France, back before everything went to shit.

Rukmini.

Shanti's cousin is one of my nightly stops on the Dream Floo. She's there-but-not-there, just like before, and I shudder to think what her skin looks like now in the rest home they've moved her to without my patented potions. My trips to Europe in my subtle body have avoided Rukmini's bedside for some reason. I know she's well-cared for by Shanti who visits her almost daily, though I've convinced her to conduct any conversation about me and Harry mentally, rather than out loud, with her cousin, as it just wouldn't do to have a hospital worker overhear talk about people banished on islands and the ministry.

I'm still no closer to understanding where this stranger has gone, but I know that she's not dead, nor is her mind extinguished. Her mental "window" has a light on, so to speak, just like the dwindling number of people whose minds I have to visit.

Sometimes I talk at her the way I would when I was in France, but most of the time I content myself with swimming in the silence I know to be her, letting her being bump up against my legs like a warm, familiar eel.

When I think back to all the hours I spent talking to her by her bedside. Now it is clear to me that I wasn't only drawn to her because her silence reminded me of my mother. Looking down at that empty, immobile form reminded me of myself. Of the part of me that was already a feast for my allotment of guilt, imprisoned for each of my many crimes.

Part of my desire to bring her mind back to her body was my urge to reunite with this other Severus who has long been meat for the worms that are my victims. I never had any doubt that I would pay sooner or later, but for some time I was able to evade this reckoning by keeping this other me in a room apart somewhere. And only when I saw the comatose woman lying there did this dormant urge for justice begin to stir in me.

But it is Rukmini who is often in my mind when I write what I suppose are my memoirs, and used to be my notes while I was still building my feeble barricade against disasters that came for me anyway.

The little I know about her is that she is Shanti's opposite: serious, more relaxed when focusing on her work—which used to be relief work of some kind—than when dealing with relationships, never sure what to do with her cousin's unstoppable vitality. So, like me, in a way. It is to this person, who I imagine to be as unflinching with regards to the truth as I am, as I want to be, that I dedicate my scribblings.

Over the last few months I have been using Harry's word-collecting charm to save as much of my fading writings as can be saved, without thinking much about why. To distract myself from the tickling and wriggling in my skin I've been collecting and pasting illustrations from my old papers and books, which were stored in a secret location before we were banished. I even unearth some of the letters Albus and Harry had saved and saved for a trial that never came. Why I would lavish such attention depicting episodes I actually lived doesn't make sense. It's a project to stave off madness, no more senseless than any of my previous projects.

But I have seen birds do a similar thing before they are about to die. Very often they will be found in their nests, or in a protected location, sitting on a treasured seed or a bit of tinsel or colored paper. It's an instinct that many species must share: the desire to put one's own flourish on what is looming as a generic death. I color some of the magics I have loved (Lilly's makes me weep–I have never known its peer) so that Rukmini can comprehend these jewels for which I have sacrificed everything, only to come to the awareness that gold must be worth very little if it can be made from my humble ingredients.

Suddenly, I understand.

Rukmini.

I can't help but tell her the truth. My stranger-friend. She's the one before whom I hold nothing back. I want to give her all of myself.

That's it.

Rushing back to my alembic, I perform the function that makes me shiver every time since the first time I did it upon realizing the Philosopher's Stone was none other than myself. Fitting my hand into the gadget, everything else is in harmony. All calculations are for naught; it doesn't matter what substances are in the slots.

This finally makes me glad. To be useful.

I won't tell you how I managed to do it, Rukmini, because I don't want you to feel there was any great pain or reluctance. I was glad to give this bit of me to you, dear stranger, and only wish I could bequeath my body to science as it were.

But the crabs have already had some of me, and the ocean will take the rest.

For the last time I spend some enjoyable time at my cauldron, making a few different versions of my bequest for you, Rukmini. Each made with the special ingredient, one of the potions I've left for you should work. A little of one of these glittering salves on the forehead and the wand-hand, and you will be whole again. And if it doesn't and my life's work was all for naught, then I don't want to know.

But you will wake. This I am sure of. So as a second resort, I leave you this book of my life, and my sneaking suspicion that my true power lies, not in what I can brew or decoct, but in my force as a cautionary tale.

No one wants to be a cautionary tale.

But if my seeing one destiny fulfilled can wake you up to yours, then I will die happy.

I leave this book to you, Rukmini, because you are one of the only ones I don't expect to see, very soon, in the ocean.

Everything, including the most frightening faces, I look forward to seeing in the deep, the true mirror. The ones I will not be able to escape from. First of all will come the men whose deaths Harry executed but I authored, along with all the ones who I killed under the guise of their lost love. In my mind they're already grabbing hold of me and tearing me apart like sharks or seizing me like sirens to take me to hell.

I've begun to long for these men. More than Harry, we are married, me and these vanished souls. They are my husbands and they wait for me in the wide water.

I could never belong to just one person but never wanted to say so.

And there will be my mother. My first kill. The only one who died with no guise of pleasure.

In the water I will at last I pour forth all my stolen magic, which I've spun into gold like a crafty character from one of my grandmother's fairy stories. Mother. Show me how to want nothing, to hurt nothing, to be nothing. Only when I see my True Face reflected in her judgment of me, in she who is but a cloud of plankton beckoning for me, will I recognize her. Reassembled by the force of waiting for me, these fragments of voice and face and form that have haunted my dreams all my life will be a woman again. Or perhaps not a woman, but an octopus with enough arms that there will be a set to embrace me while the others tear me apart.

My last fear was that I would contaminate the entire ocean with gold, but a few tests have proved that salt water without heat is much more brackish and cold than anything I've so far mixed in my cauldron.

It has taken much longer than I thought to wrap up my bare existence, but I must go. The place where the current is strongest will be lit by the sunset soon, and I want to slip quietly into dull water without having to see my reflection. It's roaring in my ears, the call of the deep.

Only then will I be in the arms of justice. Whatever is left after that will be there, if Harry listens hard enough.

Slipped in the first pages of this book I leave a note for Harry:

Harry, you will see a Fragmented letter left for you—sealed until you are ready to read it. It gives you the instructions for putting together the two parts of my magical symbol, the one I've inscribed on the ring and the one on the necklace, both of which I've left you in the place described by the letter. As you know, the letter will dissolve after you read it, and this is necessary because the symbol is very powerful magic.

You will have noticed that I leveled off the rocky points on that one area you've always wanted to plow. The aqueduct you always wanted to have has been drilled right through the center of your island. There are gold and diamonds and other precious stones lining the entirety our cave network. And best of all, the amount of fresh water has been increased many times over by finding its source deep within the earth and drawing more out. All of this has been done with this symbol, so you understand why we can't have it being abused by the wrong wizard.

Harry, my love, you are now one of the most powerful men on earth, and rich beyond your wildest dreams. I know you're too smart to go ruining the gold market or doing anything else so obvious, but do be wise with what can be your definitive freedom.

Leave your magical symbol on your island and go, go be with Shanti, if she'll have you. And if she won't, take what she has given you and be well with someone else. I have the utmost confidence that you can make a new life for yourself, my very young, very wise lover.

Three more things I ask of you:

First, that you see that the potions left here get to Shanti's cousin Rukmini. Shanti knows how to apply them.

Second, that you deliver these notes and equations to Andre N'Diaye at Paris Diderot University. In between getting my affairs in order I've managed to put together some ideas that I hope will be of help to him as he begins to understand Mick's nature.

Third, that you let our destinies separate at last and leave this book with Rukmini as well. There's nothing more for you here, but to learn how to forget me.

Signed,

Severus Jacques Theophrastus Belacqua Laurent Snape,

AKA,

The Alkahest

~fin~


	71. Chapter 71

~Epilogue~

The man stepped out into the clearing and shrugged out of his rucksack with a grateful sigh. Setting it on the ground, he looked at some indefinite point to the west. His clothing was miraculously clean for someone who had just walked a few miles in the early morning dust of rural Botswana with only a few monkeys watching him from the trees. He used a spotless white handkerchief to mop his brow.

Rummaging through his sack, he extracted a box and a notebook and, taking off his jacket, he sat down on the garment and began using one scientific instrument after another from the box. He took notes, his actions unhurried. So great was his relaxation, as was proper to a man alone in the wilds of a remote African region, that he jumped up like a shot at the French voice behind him.

"Excuse me, is it…?"

He took in the small woman, who looked to be in her early forties and might be from India or Pakistan, and started again when she completed the phrase, "Andre?"

"No one has called me that in years," the man said in his own panicked French that betrayed his own origins from some Francophone African country. "Who sent you? You can't force me to work for you! I have rights!"

The woman burst out laughing, a musical sound that contrasted oddly with the man's fear. "Forgive me, mon ami. If you had any idea how hard we tried to find you, and then here you are, doing exactly what we're doing, as we should have thought. Julian told us all about you."

"Oh!" he sat down heavily, the fear draining from his face, leaving a sort of watchful exhaustion. "Then you know all about Mick. I suppose I should call you a friend as well." He looked around. "You said 'we.' Are you here with a research team to see the fungus pass through?"

A smile played around her lips. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. But no one else is an early riser like me, so I thought I would get a head start before the crowd. I can see you thought the same."

"Yes, well, it's easier to-sense these things-if no one else is around." The woman made a move to go. "No, madam, I didn't mean you, it's just, well, no one else understands, you see —it's a rather lonely path. Which is why I go by Paul, these days, Dr. Paul Senghor."

"And I go by Padma, these days," the woman returned with a little laugh. "Here, allow me." She took a large blanket from her own rucksack and spread it on the ground. "Julian always said you were very exacting in the laboratory. It must be difficult for you to suffer all the unknown variables and contaminants in the air."

He chuckled. "He teased me on more than one occasion, yes. I've had to become comfortable with the unknown, madam, much more than I would have ever expected all those years ago when I met Julian. You knew him in Paris, or did you meet him in his travels?"

"In Paris. Much of what Julian said about this miraculous mold went straight over my head, but I do remember he was always darting off to buy strange foods at the oddest times." Her smile faded. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Julian died some eleven years ago."

The man nodded. "Yes, I knew." He took in her surprise. "We didn't stay in touch, obviously, after he left so suddenly, but I found out from the healer-woman that works in these parts, oddly enough. It was on my only other visit here that she told me."

He produced a flask of water and offered it to her, but she removed her own container from her bag. "It was one of those things that happens a few times in your life, when someone tells you bad news and you know in the pit of your stomach that it's true. One more unscientific thing I've had to accept since meeting our mutual friend."

"Oh, so you have met Nnunu?" The woman leaned forward. "I was very much hoping to talk with her. You see, we, my 'team' and I, we've been retracing Julian's steps all over the world, everywhere his extensive notes make mention of, which have led us to some very odd places. But this lady in particular seemed one of the most knowledgeable."

He grimaced. "I'm afraid if you're seeking a meaningful conversation you aren't likely to have one with that woman. Not only is she half-senile, or was when I came through eight years ago, but she's so old that the dialect she speaks is nearly extinct. No one could communicate with her with any degree of accuracy then, unless she really only spoke the nonsense the translator relayed to me, and there's no telling she's even still alive. The people in these parts don't trust outsiders, and I couldn't get a straight word out of any of them when I arrived yesterday."

"But she somehow told you that Julian had died?" The woman asked with the air of someone who knows the answer.

"Yes, it was the strangest thing. We were having this muddled conversation where I was trying to make her understand that I possessed a healthy culture of the mold she used once a year when it passed through her region, and I was just about to give up when she looked right at me. I felt like I was rooted to the spot. Then she said in what seemed like perfect French to my ears, 'He's dead, you know,' in this way that my heart knew must be true."

The woman nodded. "I've talked to many of these healers Julian had contact with, and nothing surprises me anymore," she said and then looked over her shoulder to where the man's gaze had been drawn. "Children! Come and meet Doctor Andre!"

The group of eleven children, ranging in age from ten to seventeen and of assorted ethnic backgrounds, approached slowly. One girl had a small monkey clinging to her. A cloud of butterflies was hanging over another. Several had small birds perched on their shoulders.

"This is your research team?" the man asked.

"And a finer team you could never find," the woman declared proudly. "This is Doctor Andre, the one that was friends with your uncle."

"Pleased to meet you," each of them said politely in perfect French and then, with a nod from the woman, they wandered off. Some sat on the ground to dig up some type of insect or worm. Some studied the sky or plucked leaves from the bushes and passed them back and forth as if they were reading pages from a book.

Everything took place in complete silence.

"You are a—relative—of Julian's?" the doctor asked, looking from her to the assorted children, obviously trying to find a connection.

"We were the closest thing to family he had, my husband and I. The two youngest, the twins, Jacques and Jennie, they are our biological children. The rest we've picked up along the way."

The man's expression was neutral as he watched one of the older children carry a smaller one on his back. Three of the group seemed African, two East Asian, two Slavic and the others, Western European or some mixture thereof. "Not everyone would thank you for taking these children out of their own culture."

"But this is their culture!" she burst out so fiercely the man leaned back. Padma took a deep breath and looked Andre up and down a few times until her expression calmed. "Forgive me, doctor, Julian taught me the secret of how to deal with you people who spend your days in laboratories and libraries, but we exist in the real world, where the rest of my family has not learned the lesson so well. Kindly do not say such a thing to my husband when he comes. It would wound him to hear you say that the home we have offered these children is anything less than ideal."

They gazed at the different groups of children, who often contrived to be hand in hand or lean close to one another's shoulders.

"They seem to get along very well," he admitted. "Very affectionate, aren't they?"

"Oh, yes, they're always hugging and holding one another. We thought it would be different for our adopted children, whom I assure you came from frightful conditions every one. Our two were always that way, always touching hands. They dislike being alone." A shadow passed across her face. "Do you have children, Doctor Andre? I'm sorry, I can't think of you any other way."

"No, it's fine as long as you don't tell anyone in Europe you've seen me. Yes, I have a son of ten. I named him Julian, after the man who gave me so much and explained so little."

Sympathetic eyes regarded him for a moment. "Jacques?" She called. The boy and girl approached. "One of you run and tell your father to see if he has that letter your uncle wrote to Andre."

The children nodded but only stood there studying the leaves in their hands.

"I said now," their mother said and gestured towards the path. They ran off.

"We digitized all of his notes, most of which were written on anything other than paper, long ago, so my husband probably has the file with him. It was one of the things he left at his death."

"How did he…?"

The words came quietly but steadily. "It was some illness that overtook him suddenly, possibly contracted in his travels to far-flung regions," she said. "It was a terrible loss for us, my husband and me, so perhaps you can not speak of it with him."

"Of course, I wouldn't do such a thing," the man assured her. "They should all hurry back. It's coming soon." He shook his head at her placid expression. "You don't know how wonderful it feels not to have to explain how I know. "

"I, myself, have a policy to explain as little as I can get away with, doctor." She squeezed his arm warmly.

All of a sudden the children started rummaging through their pockets. They each retrieved a small pot of some ointment and smeared some on their upper lips. "Oh dear, it really must be close," the woman said, taking out her own container.

Then the man sniffed and made a face. "Yes, here they come." He took a portion of the gel from his container, which smelled of camphor. "I thought doctors working in less than ideal conditions were the only ones who habitually carried something to use against the smell of sickness."

"No, try this." The woman offered her jar. "This is one of the many things recreated from Julian's notes. It will take away the odor but also has antimicrobial properties. I wouldn't have the children get close otherwise."

The first stretcher came into sight, bearing a man groaning and holding his stomach. The two carriers stopped to rest for a moment. A few more stretchers followed close behind. The bearers appeared to confer and several pointed at a path further on. Eventually everyone decided to stay where they were.

Some people walking on crutches or wrapped in bandages joined the first group, bringing with them the air of sickness that had reached the children first. The sick and their companions took out containers of water and food and began to wait. One man circulated in the growing crowd.

"He's taking bets, that one," Andre gestured. "The fungus could easily appear in another place within a two or three mile radius. There will be people camped out at some of the other locations where it's been sighted before."

There was a rustling in the crowd, which made way for a man who seemed to be wounded. Bent at the waist, he was sobbing and holding onto two children's hands. "No really, I'm fine, I'm not actually wounded like that," the man asserted in a good strong English voice.

The children led him through the crowd to where the woman and the doctor sat. His face was streaming with tears but he beamed and extended his hand to the seated doctor. "Don't mind me, Doctor Andre, I'm just a bit emotional today. So glad to finally meet you. The name's Arjuna, but everyone calls me Archie."

The English voice speaking very good French contrasted with the man's features, which also seemed to hail from India, though his skin was paler than the woman's. Thinking the husband was of Indian stock but born in Britain, or perhaps Eurasian, judging from the complexion of the couple's children, the doctor stood and shook his hand. "Yes, I'm pleased to—"

He stopped and looked over his shoulder at a point towards which the children's gaze was already transfixed. A smudge of gray fuzz was clinging to a tree. A murmur went through the crowd. They pointed excitedly, and then someone else gestured towards a spot on the dusty ground. The bookmaker and a few other stretcher carriers pulled out cellular telephones and spoke excitedly. The mold moved slowly when it wasn't seemingly vanishing between one point and another.

Some of the stretcher-bearers acted as crowd control, holding the anxious sufferers back. The line that had formed according to need straightened itself. Soon a couple of shouting voices were heard. The crowd fell silent and made way for a final stretcher.

An ancient woman was borne forward, her legs shrunken beneath her, but whose torso and arms appeared incongruously hearty. She pointed imperiously to where she wanted to be settled in the middle of the clearing, and the men set her down gently and then propped her up with rugs so that she could direct the morning's healings.

The two spots of mold approached her cautiously. She smiled, revealing a complete set of teeth, and greeted the fungi as if allowing a wild animal to sniff at her hand.

A small movement from her hand towards the first person in line, the wounded man, made even the birds and other insects that had added background noise to the African morning fell silent. The man's cries and groans appeared to grow in volume. The healer took some sort of stick, mumbled over it, and then used it to apply a small bit of mold to the bloody mass on the man's abdomen.

The silence in the clearing became complete for one long moment. Then the man cried out, a joyful cry, and the people all clapped. He was carried out, a changed man.

And so the healings continued. All of the most urgent cases were attended. While they watched, the woman rubbed her husband's back. "Are you all right, darling?"

"Yes, I just feel as though he were right behind me watching along with me," the man said. "Except when he was watching this same scene, everything hadn't—" He took a deep breath and then patted his pockets. "We searched for you for several years so we could give you this." He put a small data drive in the doctor's hand. "I hope it helps."

A murmur went through the crowd and they turned to look. "You see, that is the one thing I truly don't understand," Andre said "A mold that seemingly appears out of nowhere and can heal any wound—I've made my peace with that. But how does she know when to cut off the treatments for the day, and how do people accept it?"

The patients who had not been seen were packing up their bundles and receiving instructions from some of the stretcher-bearers, who pointed in various directions. "She's giving the mold a chance to rest and reproduce so that it will be around for another day, another decade. But I, for one, am not able to make these decisions so peaceably."

The husband and wife exchanged glances. "I'm sorry, I didn't ask whether you had managed to integrate Mick into a standardized treatment," the woman said. "I take it that day is still far off?"

The man sighed. "Mick is now a fully vetted medical treatment. For the past several years we haven't been trying to prove what was already apparent to the naked eye the first time I saw Julian slice his hand open and cure it with a bit of mold. What we've been struggling with is the fact that no one can seem to keep it alive but me, and I am but one man in a world full of wounded people, not all of whom are likely to be as patient as the ones who were just told to wait until tomorrow."

His words began coming out quickly, as if they had been stored for too long. "If we—my colleagues and I at an unnamed European research institute—if we were to open our doors tomorrow and people were to experience Mick's wonderful properties for themselves, the privileged of the world would never be content with a traditional surgery again. The rich and the powerful would insist upon this perfect healing and overrun our one hospital. Meanwhile, the people everywhere else would have their chance at experiencing this treatment precluded by the others who would use it up with no thought to tomorrow. And me? I'd be chained up in some laboratory somewhere, feeding an equally imprisoned and miserable Mick."

He looked at his two listeners and laughed bitterly. "It is no exaggeration, I assure you. This is why I assumed a new name and a new life in this country I will not specify even to friendly people like you, for fear of what they will do to my family.

A pained look flitted over Archie's face and Padma grasped her husband's hand.

"I stayed in Paris until I could complete my education. I attribute my degree and also my marriage to Julian and Mick, because I was able to bring my sweetheart from Senegal and set up a life for us as if by magic, once I had my academic place assured by this odd ability I developed. Things were fine, for a time, until that research team got close to establishing the safety of a drug based on Mick, which, unfortunately, had the same drawback as my current treatment—the mold must stay alive in order for it to work, and it can't be kept alive long enough to ship anywhere—or the culture alive on its own long enough to give me more than a very short vacation like this one.

"Julian began to regret the same situation shortly after bringing Mick to Paris," the husband interjected, "so it must have gotten old for you after so long."

"Yes, at some point I started to chafe under these conditions, but what really started to bother me was that they wanted to make production more efficient, they said, so they were storing the cultures in ever more crowded and uncomfortable conditions. I walked in one day and they had scores of small containers in which they were trying to grow the culture. It was like a factory, with this hideous lighting the mold doesn't like, with nothing to climb on and no room to move."

He caught their smiles. "Yes, all the considerations everyone thought Julian was mad to worry about, for someone who has an affinity for Mick, it's like hearing this silent scream. I had to do something for this substance that had given me so much. So I began exploring other avenues, other academic placements where perhaps they would appreciate this life form as such, wanting to learn more from it instead of racing to patent a medicine that we couldn't properly use.

"At around this time my wife went to get her passport and that of my infant son ready, as I wanted to be able to leave quickly. She was surprised to find the documents delayed indefinitely. That was when the director of my department came to see me. Perhaps Julian mentioned him?"

"You were the only one from the medical sciences section that Julian had anything good to say about, so all the rest ran together for me," Archie said wryly.

"I don't think even Julian would have thought the man capable of what he did. He explained in the most polite and amicable terms that if I so much as tried to take a day vacation across the channel to England, my wife and son would be detained as illegal aliens upon trying to cross back over the border. That none of us had any freedom whatsoever, because I was the only goose that could lay this particular golden egg, and they weren't throwing away years of research just like that."

"But that's outrageous!" the husband exclaimed. "S-Julian always used to complain about their inability to see the big picture, as he called it, but…."

"But you got away," Padma prompted the doctor.

"Yes, I had the good fortune to find this independent research consortium that was willing to accept my very vague promises of a scientific breakthrough—I had signed a confidentiality agreement in Paris, of course, and I wasn't willing to open myself up to prosecution until I was well and truly away from all that.

Andre's face split into a grin and he slapped his knee. "Once it was settled and my family and I were ready to become refugees from the scientific community in Paris, I did have a little fun sabotaging all my work. You see, I'd always kept a culture of my own at home, just in case something happened with the other one, so I merely let that one grow to a healthy size while letting the official strain begin to wither for unknown reasons.

"I had to endure many shouting sessions with all the other scientists, laughing on the inside while I pretended a sincere befuddlement at why this species that I'd enjoyed complete mastery over suddenly stopped eating anything I offered.

"It took six months of failures before they had to finally accept that the strain was completely dead, as far as they knew. It was very difficult to play the part of the disgraced academic, but I did it long enough that they stopped paying attention to me, and then one day, my family and I were gone, and our old names left behind. The research was set back for years while the new team started from scratch, but I had to think of my family."

"Don't worry," Archie said, putting his arm around his wife. "We know a few things about crossing heaven and earth for family's sake. "

"Oh look," Padma pointed towards the throng of children. "They are talking just fine. I hoped they would." The children were clustered around the old woman, while her two stretcher bearers looked on in amazement at the eleven assorted young people talking fluently in the woman's extinct tongue.

Their surprise was mirrored in the doctor's face. "That's impossible. Where would they have learned this dialect?"

The couple exchanged a glance and Archie got up to talk to the healer while Padma turned to the scientist. "There are some things you do not understand, but have learned to accept, yes, doctor?"

"Yes," the scientist said, watching the husband talking to the old woman's helpers and fiddling with something on his hand. The tall, muscled men shook their heads vehemently. The healer was making increasingly commanding motions with her arm and speaking in a loud voice. Finally she produced a cellular telephone and shook it at them. Reluctantly the assistants left her there on the ground, but not without transmitting a look of menace to the much-smaller husband.

Throughout the whole exchange Archie stood his ground and smiled.

"Your husband should think twice about tangling with anyone from this region. She may be half-batty, but the old woman is a local treasure."

"You'll find my husband and my children can all take perfectly good care of themselves. Watch closely," Padma said. A feast appeared from the children's bags. Out of nowhere, fruits, sandwiches, dishes of rice and other foods appeared and were placed on spotlessly clean china.

"Please join us for lunch," she invited the doctor, picking up her bag and blanket and taking the astonished man gently by the arm and steering him towards the group.

"Emma, bring the doctor's things here. Soren, give Andre some of that antimicrobial solution for his hands. Diedre, find out what he is hungry for," the small woman said with the air of a general used to being obeyed. The lunch was distributed in an orderly fashion, with everyone settling on blankets, Archie sitting next to the old woman and serving her the foods of her choice, and Padma sitting with the doctor on their own blanket.

"Would I let my family eat something that wasn't safe?" the woman asked, watching the doctor look at his plate suspiciously.

He began to eat.

"How long do you estimate the fungus will stay in town?" Padma asked. "The children like nothing so well as to study a new species. They'll be talking of nothing else for week.s."

"When they're not in school," the doctor said.

"Oh, school," she made a dismissive gesture. "Some of our older children are currently enrolled in some of the best universities in Europe, and I don't think they've had a moment's hard time keeping up after their untraditional education with us."

As he ate, Andre watched the children thoughtfully. "These are all orphans, you say?"

"Worse than orphans, monsieur. This is their true family." A boy pointed at something invisible in the sky and they all looked up. "And I assure you, each one of these children was abandoned, beaten, starved or otherwise mistreated, and the only people sorry to see them go were the owners of the ones who were in the sex trade."

The man looked shocked.

"Don't worry, people who are only interested in money are easily satisfied," Padma said, tearing off a strip of bread.

Now Andre looked outraged. "You purchased some of these individuals!"

She gave him a savage look. "We did whatever had to be done, at any cost, to rescue them. Would you do otherwise if you had the means? I'd thank you to not bring it up for Petra, the eldest over there. She has been very happy with us." She gestured to a girl who was wearing a sari and headscarf.

"So you just pick and choose the ones who merit to be part of your little designer family?" he spluttered.

"No, the other thousand men, women and children whom we've rescued all went to various relief organizations. Petra is one of the few who found a home with us. This is our life's work, and my husband is much more sensitive than I about hearing unwarranted criticism."

They ate in silence for a while. Andre's eyes were on the old lady. "She must be a hundred years old. I came back to question her some more about Mick. The last time she said some things that I've only begun to understand." He selected a piece of fruit.

"She said that the mold was a bit of heaven, and that's how it performed miracles. At the time I thought it superstitious nonsense, but she said something I can't understand.

"'Like your friend," she said. 'Like—' but she said some other name, not Julian, and I thought her mind must be wandering. Then she said, 'The fungus has stayed alive all this time because it can find the purity it needs all over the world. It keeps moving so people, in their infinite stupidity, haven't been able to stamp it out. People have a hard time going unnoticed like a bit of mold, and sadly people like your friend have a hard time of it. They're a throwback to some other time, when people were still equipped for things like union. Worse for them, they are forced to be alone. They know not that they belong to something larger, and if they did no good would come from finding another such as they.'

"What do you think she meant?" Andre asked.

Her eyes moist, the Padma took a moment to reply. "When I was pregnant with the twins, it was a very difficult time. The doctors said I would have to choose one or the other, that the two lives wouldn't be saved." She set her mouth. "Thankfully they knew less than nothing, and my babies were born, though very sickly.

"Jennie and Jacques couldn't even be separated in the hospital, not for a moment, or they'd raise a fuss. But they were both very ill for the first two years, until I brought an art project to their bedsides—my husband is a genius with art, and I dabble, so we wanted to start the children off early. We were going to bake this dough I had made and stick in seeds and sequins and things to make ornaments for Christmas. With them so ill, we were afraid it would be our last with them.

"To my surprise the children were more fascinated by this task than anything else. They pushed around dried beans and things with a startling level of concentration for two 2-year-olds. When they had each pressed their design in the dough they were very tired, and I baked them while they were asleep. Jacques took the one that Jennie had made and vice versa. And they began to get much better right away."

Padma leaned towards the doctor. "There are things you don't understand, I don't understand, but I live with them every day. Julian knew things you and I don't. He could see and feel things almost no one on earth can. Except our children, our children sense each other from miles away."

Archie had wandered over during this last speech, leaving the old woman in his children's care, and was smoothing Padma's hair. "I first began retracing Julian's steps as a way to help the children. We had been told by certain practitioners that our twins shared the same condition that Julian spent his life trying to understand. When they were a little better we brought them along. Our idea was to learn from the little surviving wisdom that might be able to improve their health, but our children soon were teaching us."

"They pulled us to an abandoned wood in the middle of the Carpathians," Padma continued. "I was terrified and even my husband was nervous, but they cried and insisted so that we had no choice but to obey. They led us to a child, or what became a child again under our care, living half-feral in the wilderness. A boy abandoned who knows how long ago-thankfully he had acquired the rudiments of speech before they left him in the middle of nowhere with some sort of brand on his hand. We later found out this meant he was cursed, and for—people of a certain sensitive nature-to stay away.

"How two babies of not even three were able to communicate with a mostly-wild creature of the forest is not something I can explain to you, monsieur. Well, I could, but you would not believe me. Suffice it to say that they recognized each other. They understood each other. And they helped each other, the first gesture being that together the twins made a sort of amulet for that new member of our family, who we call 's at Oxford right now."

Andre's face was astonished.

"Not how most stories of so-called 'wild children' end, as you know. Those two you see over there with the butterflies, those are Egan and Patrice, from Turkey and Fiji, respectively. They were also abandoned by their families. But we have had others who had the opposite problem, and were kept as prized pets in the brothels of the world specializing in such offerings. One of my husband's other interests is fighting this type of exploitation, and his head would fetch quite a price from several international crime syndicates—if they were at all able to trace his activities to one man."

She pointed to the girl wearing a sari with the veil obscuring her face. "We've been able to offer her some, er, reconstructive surgery, but Petra is our most recent addition. She burned herself with acid to discourage the unwanted attentions from men far and wide. We thought it was high time to seek out Mick in case he could do something more for her scars. "

Andre was suddenly all business. "You know, we haven't extended many of our investigations into such extensive tissue damage, because the remedy in question is about healing open wounds, something that, as you know, Mick does remarkably well. I wonder…"

"Monsieur Andre, you are so like him in a way. The world falls away for you when you begin to theorize. Like for—Julian-and our children as well, when they are investigating things. I've watched them pass back and forth a leaf or a stone that looks like nothing to my eyes, but it engrosses them for hours. They are all remarkably gifted when given the right environment." Archie and Padma smiled at one another and he kissed her cheek.

The doctor gazed at the couple in front of him for some moments. "I suppose it is all right to share the true reason for my visit. My son." He looked thoughtfully at the horde of children. "I wonder. Could he have something similar to your young ones?

You see, my Julian, from a very small age, has known how to feed Mick."

Andre nodded at his listeners' surprise. "It was my practice to bring him to the lab occasionally, and one day I looked around and there he was feeding Mick bubble gum from his pocket! Naturally, I was about to scold him, not ever having though of chewing gum as food, but suddenly I sensed that he was exactly right. My three-year-old had pinpointed what I had not."

"Has your son had extraordinary difficulty in life?" Padma asked. "Misfortune, unhappiness, ill health?" The doctor shook his head.

"Then probably he's a normal boy with a special ability," Archie put in. "Our children, every one except the twins, have all suffered terribly in their short lives. I would say that it's unusual for someone with their set of qualities to survive to twenty, without special interventions. Their condition is not so much rare, as it is ill-suited to the earth."

Padma took her husband's hand. "Does anyone else know?" she asked.

"No. Supposedly I am calling in the right diet from here, although practice has shown that this does not work. That specimen," Andre nodded to a bit of mold that had slithered over a pile of rice spilled by one of the children, "is eating rice, but I'd bet anything that my strain is eating something else entirely. My son will tell me this evening.

"I do not want my son to be forced into this responsibility before he is old enough to choose," the doctor said pleadingly. "Perhaps Nnunu can teach me more about Mick's nature and we can find a way to make him a resource for all humanity. Or else it will be none."

The couple exchanged a glance. "Exactly like Abelard and the Too-Pure Potion," Archie hissed.

"Oh look!" Padma exclaimed.

The two men followed her arm to where she was pointing at the bit of stray mold crawling over Petra's sari. The girl was giggling as she let it find its way through the folds of cloth and up to her face.

Before, it was as though a bit of smoked glass existed between the girl's face and the observer's eye. She seemed a normal-looking girl, but it was as though the eye couldn't focus on her as well as others' faces. That's what the doctor had thought, at any rate, but in a flash it was like some curtain dropped. The young woman's face was terribly, terribly scarred, tragically disfigured by an acid burn he found it difficult to believe she had inflicted on herself.

The mold was crawling around her face, and she was laughing as if t tickled. Before Doctor Andre's eyes he saw the wasted and shriveled tissue become young and smooth again.

Everyone had gone quiet, and when the girl was healed, her siblings fell upon her in a heap, stroking her face, hugging her, as Petra looked over them to her parents.

Not wishing to intrude upon this emotional family moment, Andre wandered over to ask his questions of the old woman.

She was fast asleep after eating well.

Andre returned to his laboratory and pored over the notes from Julian, which, if they didn't yet make complete sense to him, at least held the promise that Mick had begun to make sense to someone.

In late May, the doctor was called away from his research. He greeted three young people at the front security gate before his well-guarded institution. "Would you please come in?"

As soon as they were in his private office, he dropped all pretense. "Who in God's name are you, and how did you find me?" 

The three exchanged glances. "Our brothers and sisters could, er, smell that you had come from Switzerland," one girl said.

"Our mother sent us so you could have a vacation," the boy added. "Padma. You met everyone in Africa."

"A vacation? What, and leave three university students to muck about in my lab? Of all the—"

"Please, doctor, don't send us home," the other girl begged. "Mum gets frightfully upset."

"You should go on a vacation, or she'll find out," the boy agreed.

After observing their comfort with his precious mold—and their general dexterity in a laboratory—Andre grudgingly agreed to take his family on their first significant vacation ever. The two girls were to take healthy strains of mold away with them, and the boy would stay in Switzerland, caring for and experimenting upon the fungus.

After a well-deserved rest far away from any thoughts of fungus, Andre finally gave in to his worry and called the two numbers the girls had left with him.

One led him to India, and Padma answered the phone. "Magda," she yelled. "I hope you've not been thinking about your work during your vacation," Padma chided him.

"Not at all, I was simply curious how Mick was getting on," the doctor said. The girl was put on the line and he was reassured that a healthy culture was growing at her location.

Next he called the other number, a Paris extension. "Hello?" a woman's voice answered.

"Hello, yes, Madame,, excuse me. I was looking to speak with Irina," the doctor said.

"Oh, Doctor Andre! How nice to finally meet you!" the woman exclaimed. "Julian told me so much about you."

"The only reason I agreed to this arrangement was on the terms that my true name not be used," Andre said stiffly.

"No one has so much as breathed your name, do not upset yourself. It's just that I get confused sometimes, having to keep names straight. And Julian used to call you 'the cautious Senegalese.' Talking as you do, who can blame me for thinking of the name he used for you?" the woman said in rapid French, in a manner that reminded him somewhat of Padma.

"And who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" he asked.

"Rukmini. S-Padma's cousin." The woman laughed. "It is very difficult to keep all the names straight. Here she is. So nice to meet you!"

"Hello?" said Irina's voice.

"Yes, Irina? This is Doctor Senghor." He heard the sounds of small children running around. "How many of you are there? It sounds like a horde running around."

She laughed. "There are five little ones. I'm helping Aunt Rukmini take care of them. She rushed to add. "In between caring for Mick."

Harry made his monthly stop to the island to be there for the Ministry shipment and keep up the fiction that he was there full-time. It was also his studio, so now he looked on it as a method of forcing him to paint. Sometimes Shanti joined him, but most of the time he was alone with his memories and his art.

Every day he spent there, he talked with the sea at the time of day the sun made it glimmer back at him, as if it were responding to his words.

"Severus." Harry waited for the water to wink at him. "Every one of the children reminds me of a different facet of you. If only you had not spent so much of your life alone."

The tears began to fall, as they still did, these ten years later. "Losing you is a wound that never heals, but you understand that, too, damn you."

Harry continued relating his family's adventures, telling of his quest to rescue every Alkahest he could, using the wealth and freedom Severus had left him in service of his sworn mission to take away some of the world's unhappiness, even if it wasn't the specific unhappiness that Harry had once added to it.

"I love you, Severus."

Finally, Harry felt his toes grow warm and his nose grow cold, and he knew he had been heard.


End file.
